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These essays have appeared (1903-1915) 
in the New York Sun, the Philistine, Mind, 
Beedy's Mirror, the Critic, Liberty, Moods 
and Wiltshire's Magazine. Thanks are here- 
by extended for permission to reprint them. 



* < <_ CONTENTS ' * ' 

The Brain and the World .... 7 

The Mirth of the Brain 13 

Wonder 20 

The Almightiness of Might .... 31 

The Intangible Life 39 

The Irony of Negatives 51 

History 63 

The Passion of Distance 75 

The Comic View ........ 82 

The Artist 89 

Under a Mask 99 

A Memorable Escape ...... 106 

The Masquerade .117 

Respectability 124 

The Impenitent 131 

The Eternal Renaissance ..... 146 

Silence . «. 154 

Posterity: The New Superstition . . 163 

An Evaporating Universe .... 170 

The Trail of the Worm 180 

Cosmic Marionettes 188 

The Drama of Days 194 

Absorption: A Universal Law . . . 199 

Acatalepsy 208 

Coda 215 



THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 

WE never come into contact with 
things, but only with their images. 
We never know the real — only- 
effigies of the real. We do not pursue 
objects; we pursue the reflection of objects. 
We do not possess things; we possess the 
emotions that things inspire. 

If I pluck a flower and hold it in my 
hand I have merely come into contact with 
an image in my brain created by certain 
complex influences transmitted through the 
senses from an unknowable. No one pur- 
sues power or wealth; he pursues ideas and 
images of power and wealth. Strictly 
speaking, I do not live in a house, in the 
air, but live in my house-image, my air- 
image. Images and thoughts being the 
very pulp of consciousness, it follows that 
in images and thoughts there lies the only 
reality we can ever know. Imagination 
and its elements are not the effigies of 
matter, but what we term matter is the 

(7) 



8 THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 

effigy of our images. Hence the imaginary 
world — the world of intellect and images — 
is the only real world. It is the unanalyz- 
able data of consciousness. 

We never get over the threshold of our 
images. We live in images whether in rest 
or motion. Illusion does not consist in be- 
lieving our images and dreams to be real, 
but in believing that there exists anything 
else but images and dreams. The illusions 
of the brain are the only realities; they 
become delusions when we try to ex- 
ternalize them. All practical men are 
insane because they seek to externalize the 
internal. All poets and philosophers are 
sane because they seek to internalize the 
external. 

Idolatry is the worship of the non- 
existent. All practical life is founded on 
the belief that there is something to be 
had outside of the self, that there is a 
pleasure to be had in things per se, that 
Mecca is a place, not a belief. Matter is 
something fashioned by the brain, an eidolon 
of the will, the symbol of an image. The 
practical person tries to grasp the symbol; 
the poet tries to grasp the image. The 
former must always fail because we never 



THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 9 

come into contact with matter, which is 
the symbol of ideas; no mind ever comes 
into contact with the external world. The 
latter (the poet) always succeeds because 
he arrays himself in himself; lives imme- 
diately in the thought, image or emotion 
that a thing creates; he knows that the 
materialization of an image is the substi- 
tution of a symbol for a reality. 

The sense of universal disillusion, of the 
almost total absence of relation between 
dream and deed, is the ever-recurring proof 
of the egocentricity of man. He is the 
sun around which swing and dance the 
worlds tossed off through immeasurable 
time; worlds so seeming real, but which are 
mere spawn of dreams, man's chance-litter. 
To stretch out the hand from the House 
of Images seeking to grasp this domed and 
pinnacled mirage is the signal that wakes 
the imps of irony from their subterranean 
vaults and sends them swarming and gib- 
bering over the roofs and through the 
streets of that image-chrismed city, now 
suddenly become a deserted city of rotted 
rookeries. 

The eternal legend of the Brain and the 
World, of the Image and the Mirage is 



10 THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 

found in all ages — in the fables of Tantalus 
and Ixion, in the world-wisdom of Don 
Quixote and Faust, in "El Magico Pro- 
digioso" of Calderon, in the Dhamapada, 
in the Ibsen plays. The legerdemain of 
the senses it is that scratches those lines of 
sorrow at mouth-ends, draws heavy blank 
curtains over the wild scenery of the eye, 
sets a flag of truce on the purposeful brow 
and sends us to cower behind the breast- 
works of an eternal reticence. 

Men sail the seas for adventure, travel 
towards the poles for the novel and seek in 
remote lands the tang of the strange, the 
witchery of the weird; but the adventure, 
the novelty, the tang and the witchery are 
in men themselves. I am my own novelty, 
my own adventure; it is I who give tang 
to life. I am bewitched of wonder and mys- 
tery — than me there is nothing more weird 
that is conceivable. He who goes a-seeking 
leaves himself behind. Other than your 
soul there is no reality. We can go toward 
nothing unless that thing has first come 
toward us. The brain is not only the center 
of gravity, but is gravity. The Will is not 
only the inventor of the universe, but is 
the universe. 



THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 11 

We go toward ourselves. My images 
and dreams and thoughts are eggs. I 
enwomb and unwomb myself. I have in- 
finities, eternities, nadirs, zeniths boxed in 
my brain. I am always delivering myself 
to myself, cannot forsake myself, cannot 
possibly exist in the world — seeing that the 
world exists in me. 

The world began with mind; before that 
it was only a possibility. The brain is the 
radiant hub of the universal illusion. We 
have exiled the stars in their spaces and 
imprisoned light in its wall-less tombs of 
air. Pole star and the frozen mountains 
of the moon are the mere flotsam and jetsam 
of our evolved and highly elaborated imag- 
ining. All — all is only the balustrade of 
the mind, out on the furthest portals of 
which this mysteriously appeared I peers 
for all its days at the image-children that 
it has flung off in its incalculable evolutions. 

This ethereal upstart with the brazen 
acclaim, this image-haunted mystery that 
we name Man, who, after all, is but a 
slight excess of Nothing and yet the meas- 
ure of all, a drop of blazing oil that has 
bubbled out of a beaker of flame in the 
hands of a Something — what does he know? 



12 THE BRAIN AND THE WORLD 

There are the image and the imagined, 
the Brain and the World, the Eternal 
Ghost fabricating its world-shrouds. 



THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 

WHY is there laughter in an 
existence that none of us laughs 
at? Why is there mirth in 
a world of struggle and precarious 
chances? We come into life with a scream 
of agony and go out of it with palms ex- 
tended, signifying nothing. Proserpina is 
the goddess of death, and no one has been 
found stronger than she — except it be 
Momus, the god of laughter, whom Proser- 
pina cannot slay. 

Laughter is no accident. It is something 
rooted in the depths of our being. Pain 
is deeper than all thought; laughter is 
higher than all pain. Care cudgels us with 
an ebon stave — but look above! there is 
Laughter — the fairy goddess waving a sil- 
ver-bright wand. 

There is a comic spirit in things as well 
as a tragic spirit. The gods bowl us over 
and still we make merry. Hurricane, 
earthquake, war and fire conspire to an- 

(13) 



14 THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 

nihilate us, but jocosity and joviality flow 
in an unbroken stream from the springs of 
buoyancy set deep within the soul of man. 

Only the heart suffers. The brain is 
the peaceful, undisturbed, eternal spectator 
of the monstrous paradox called Life. The 
mind never worries, is never perturbed, is 
never in pain. The heart — that great lu- 
panar of desires — may seduce the brain 
to participate in its earth-itches; but in it- 
self the mind is a detached, impersonal ob- 
server of the great tangled web of passion 
and error that is spun in the heart of man. 

Mind as mind has the placidity of a mir- 
ror. All things are reflected in it, but for 
the image of Lady Macbeth it cares no 
more than for the image of Falstaff . 

The unconscious universe struggled and 
fought until it evolved a brain. In mind 
the star and plant rise to thought. The 
World-Spirit contemplates itself through 
the brain of man. It is the light born of 
darkness. Through the brain nature passes 
from actor to observer, from blind, eyeless 
combat to wide-eyed intelligence, from an 
immemorial pain to the beginnings of an 
immemorial mirth. 

Impersonal contemplation — that is the 



THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 15 

secret of laughter. Mirth is as old as the 
first mind that detached itself — even for a 
single hour — from the service of the emo- 
tions and the lower nature generally. The 
first man who said, "I will retire from the 
combat a little while to the hill to watch 
the fray" was the first man who laughed 
with his brain. Distance, aloofness, height 
strike out by a magic psychic friction the 
spark that bears in its centre the germ of 
philosophy. Only cosmic comedians be- 
come as the gods. 

The elements of the incongruous and ri- 
diculous run through all the affairs of men. 
The intervention of the unknown at each 
moment in their affairs and schemes whirls 
them off their feet and elicits from Intellect 
the same gleeful scream that children give 
vent to in a circus when the trapeze per- 
former whirls unexpectedly through the 
air. With the significant difference that 
the circus acrobat knows where he is going 
to land, but the acrobat Man in this great 
cosmic circus is caught unawares and lands 
where Circumstance forgot to spread her 
nets. 

The World- Spirit is a freakish, ironic 
spirit. It contrives strange outcomes to our 



16 THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 

conscious plans. We plan and plan in one 
spirit, and behold I another spirit takes 
possession. Dante's Inferno, written in a 
religious fervor as an exposition of theo- 
logical conception, set at work the forces 
which finally overthrew those very concep- 
tions. The Inquisition, instituted to fasten 
by force a religious creed on the world, 
was the means that brought about the final 
annihilation of the means. Anarchy spreads 
just in the measure that you persecute it. 
The means employed to enslave a people 
are the very means that awaken the pas- 
sion for liberty in their souls. There 
is no surer way to keep forces in motion 
that you wish to annihilate than to persist- 
ently struggle against them. If you wish 
to see how far a pendulum will swing to 
the right, draw it to the extreme left. 

This is the Immanent Mirth in things — 
the quiet laughter of the hidden Prestidigi- 
tateur; the exquisite mockery of nature 
which made hilarious the days of Rabelais. 

Leisure is the condition of the growth 
of the smile in the brain. Laughter comes 
with contemplation. A man may take joy 
in his work, but he cannot laugh at it. 
Mirth is a kind of serene scepticism. It 



THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 17 

comes only with intelligence. The percep- 
tion that life is something of a joke may 
possibly come to a boor laboring in the 
fields, but it clothes itself to him as a bitter 
jest, for his brain is still the handmaiden 
of his stomach. The leisure of Mephisto- 
pheles, the intelligence of Lucifer — these 
must be approached to perceive the depth 
on depth of world- jollity. 

Fanaticism, the man with the fixed idea— 
the antithetical mental attitude to the world- 
sceptic — is incapable of cerebral mirth. The 
finest minds are those in which intelligence 
and insight spread out like the gradual 
opening of a circular fan. They come to 
perceive all sides in one glance. They are 
like a man who stands at the north pole — 
all longitudes centre in him; he sees all 
the imaginary lines that men map and num- 
ber and believe in. He is conscious for the 
first time of the absurdity of direction; he 
comes to know in a flash how purely arbi- 
trary are affirmative ideas about any- 
thing. 

And he laughs a long laugh into the 
skies. 

The dominant note observable in Nature 
— observable only to the eye of the mind 



18 THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 

that has severed itself from the prejudices 
of the will — is blitheness. She seems al- 
ways to be laughing; her most terrible mo- 
ments are like the scowls that elders put 
on in front of naughty children who really 
amuse them — the mocking mask of mirth. 
Nature goes her way through her four 
seasons with a carelessness, an insouciance, 
a sangfroid such as men have who care 
nothing for death or who have learned the 
fine secret that the tomb covers but does 
not hide. Life is a huge joke to the Im- 
mortal Mother. She laughs eternally 
because she is wiser than her children. She 
knows nothing is lost. She knows that 
death is recomposition and pain is the way 
character is tooled. 

How deep was Shakespeare's mirth when 
he gave us Puck! Puck, the lordly imp of 
a topsy-turvy universe; Puck who is the 
seer par excellence of the world; Puck who 
put a girdle of laughter around the universe ; 
Puck who smiled and smiled and was not 
a villain — only a divine sportsman who 
played battledore and shuttlecock with us 
in the fields of Eternity. 

There is quenchless grief in all things — 
if we will have it so. Move up into the 



THE MIRTH OF THE BRAIN 19 

higher altitudes and the grief in all things 
turns to a quenchless mirth. 

The higher altitude is just that step from 
the heart to the brain. 



WONDER 

TO see, one must close the eyes. This 
is the paradox of insight — a seeing 
into. The physical world is nothing 
but insulated force. It is only the mind's 
eye that can pierce the arras of images and 
behold the unimaginable. 

The mystic sense is a form of vascular 
activity. It is the palpitant ethereal in us, 
the radio-activity of the corpuscle. In the 
sluiceways of the brain it rises to conscious- 
ness. 

Our brains are portable universes, and 
our souls are unbirthed worlds. God 
created the material world, Bishop Berkeley 
destroyed it, and Herbert Spencer re- 
created it. We are coequal with the creat- 
ive gods. Man weaves microcosm into 
macrocosm, bastes the ideal to the real, hems 
soul to body. He tracks the roving ideal 
from its lair in the cell of the polyp to its 
full growth in his own brain, and he pins 
the Eternal to a Law. His dreams trans- 

(20) 



WONDER 21 



figure the Known to the Unknowable. 

We have no criterion for anything. We 
live in a Mystery. The data of life are 
pleasure and pain, and these may be myths ; 
an illusion of the nerve cells. 

Seas of sound, light and motion swirl in 
our brains, and the "great processes" are 
cell-eddy. Thought is cerebral sight. We 
may trail Circumstance back to the Primal 
Antagonism, and there it is lost. Conscious- 
ness is the flash produced by friction. Birth 
is recomposition of old matter, and death 
is dissolution and recomposition. Mind is 
evolved from mud, and mud is mind in 
transition. Form is purely accidental, and 
the accidental is the unexpected inexorable. 
Time is the space between thoughts, and 
thought is Time spluttering. Space is the 
distance between two illusions, and illu- 
sions are what-might-have-been projected 
on the blank screen of tomorrow. All 
growth presupposes pain, and all pain en- 
genders growth. Society is the systemati- 
zation of instincts, and instincts are strati- 
fied lusts. All knowledge is word- juggle. 
To know all would be to know nothing. 

The mystic waits and wonders. 

And this Wonder is the back-stairs to 



22 WONDER 



the stars — it is the Northwest Passage to 
the pinnacle of the cosmos. It is where 
one beholds most, but where one knows 
least. It is to feel all things — yet to stand 
in universal relations. It is a vision of 
things in their totality but not in their 
wholeness. 

Everything is grounded in mystery. 
Everything is swimming, and the stable 
does not exist. Life is a series of guesses, 
and there is mystery in a match. The com- 
monplace is the habitual, and the habitual 
is a mystery that has grown stale from 
sense-insistence. Life undulates; there is 
no such thing as a level; a straight line 
is a myth, and all directions are indirec- 
tions. Up and down are movable points 
on horizons that do not exist; focus is an 
eye-trick, and motion is cell-palpitation. 

All things radiate from a common point, 
and differences are the same looked at from 
various angles. The sap that flows in the 
tree, the blood that flows in the veins, the 
fires that flame from the sun, the waters 
that run to the stars, and the passion litanies 
breathed by lovers are aspects of force. 
Star-shine and eye-glance and water-gleam 
are the same. 



WONDER 23 



The star sees itself through the medium 
of the human eye, and the moon shines on 
itself. 

Law created the brain, and the brain is 
a crucible of Law. So each thing is a 
compendium of all things, and still the All 
is not found. 

All acts are multiplied in the doing. Our 
breathing builds or destroys unknown uni- 
verses, and a gesture is a signal to eternity. 
The cells are chalices of desire. Every act 
is a breeder of beings. On what shore 
breaks the last vibration caused by the 
lowering of an eyelash? Does the lover 
alone throb with ecstasy when his beloved's 
eyes thicken with love-mists? And who 
shall say that our most subtle smile does 
not stir to life a thousand unseen existences 
that have been quivering on the thresholds 
of life? 

No act ever succeeds or fail; it does both. 
We influence the unknown at every turn. 
We are unknown workers in an unknown 
world. We weave tomorrow on the shuttle 
of today and unravel the past each minute. 
All things are trying to stand still and go 
on at the same time. Men desire rest and 
motion simultaneously. They desire to go 



24 WONDER 



on in order to be able to rest. Self-con- 
servation is the basic principle in both rest 
and motion. It is an everlasting ebb and 
flow. But the mind ravished by Wonder is 
beyond ebb and flow. 

"Things pass into their opposites by 
accumulation of indefinable quantities," 
says Walter Pater. In that process is 
buried the paradox of evolution and the 
concept which breeds the mystic mind. Hate 
is comic, for you shall in time become that 
which you hate; and the thing you scorn — 
behold! that thou art! "Tvat Twam Asi" 
(for that thou art) repeats the Hindoo 
sage when the West talks of Me, Thou, It. 
"Tvat Twam Asi" repeat Schopenhauer and 
Emerson. A fact is but the glazed surface 
on an abysmal mystery. It is the symbolist 
in art who knows this. And all symbolists 
are mystics. 

Evolution is a method, and method is 
the mantle of law. The Law itself lies out 
of time and space. It is the Spencerian 
Eternal Energy; it is that which knows 
neither "upward" nor "downward." Like 
ether, it permeates all things; it floods the 
atoms ; it is world-shine — consciousness. 

Gur souls are a method — part of the 



WONDER 25 



mantle; and every act is redolent of the 
past. Things rise to a summit and flow 
down on the other side, and the baby in its 
birth hour may have attained the pinnacle 
of the inconceivable, for the birth of a babe 
has more of accomplishment in it than the 
maturity of a man. 

Nothing is spurious ; all things are in their 
place. Artificiality is the curd on the nat- 
ural. No man wills; he is willed — for he 
is a growth, and his roots are in the primor- 
dial. The secret is in the seed, and the seed 
is the secret. No man can say, "I am 
evolved;" he is forever evolving. He is a 
"God in the crib," and his acts are only 
hints of his dreams. 

Decay is growth seen from the other 
side. Decay and growth flout permanence. 
An eternal continuance dragging anchor; 
a measured swirl of unmeasured waters; 
light flowering to form; abstraction mask- 
ing as a concretion — what else do we know? 

We came from the simian and tend to the 
sublime; and as the simian for ages was big 
with man, so is the sublime heavy with its 
unborn gods. The worm treads fast upon 
the heels of God. Change has woven 
shrouds for myriads of Creators, for the 



26 WONDER 



universe subsists en passant. The opal tint 
in the dawn was spun by the lilies of the 
field, and the human form is chiselled star- 
dust. Alchemy is as universal as gravita- 
tion. 

The universe began in an equilibration 
and will end in an equilibration. A sigh, 
an unrest, a faint ripple caused by some 
antagonistic principle — and the Law moved, 
and suffering was born. The pageantry 
of the Fates began. Vega in Lyra and the 
ant on its hill were diswombed in travail. 

But why? With that question Wonder 
falls on us. 

You cannot seize upon the past or the 
future. The universe is an eternal minute 
forever tottering to its doom — cosmic 
splash; torrent -mist ; dream follicles that 
have burst on the brain walls. Our sub- 
limest act is still the abracadabra of an 
Unknown God — a God who hides behind 
a leaf and scribbles his contrarieties ; a God 
who is flea and futurity; who is oxygen and 
Arcturus. There are cabals held in the 
acorn, and the gods are enthroned in diatom. 
The radiating laws are hubbed on a pimple, 
and "evolution" is but a spoke in the Wheel 
of Fire. 



WONDER 27 



Genius has Wonder; it is its sixth sense. 
The being that has envisaged the cosmos 
in a glance exhales the ether of the un- 
plumbed spaces his eyes have beheld. He 
is a white flame fleshed for the nonce. And 
his poems and pictures and philosophies 
are fables of Wonder. 

Without this sense of Wonder the sing- 
ing of the stars is calliope music; the uni- 
verse is doggerel. 

With the mystic gleam the universe is 
still doggerel — but scrawled by a Shakes- 
peare. 

Science is bankrupt. The unlettered 
mystic in the Indian forest three thousand 
years ago knew what science is just now 
beginning to tell us. They now announce 
that atoms are, after all, but centres of 
force. "There is no such thing as matter," 
said the Hindoo complacently ages ago. 
Science has discovered a substance called 
radium, which gives forth particles without 
losing weight. Nothing can be lost, nothing 
can be gained in an infinite universe, has 
been the essence of mystical teaching from 
Heraclitus to Emerson. Wonder's method 
is divination. 

To the mystic, life is a "conscious slum- 



28 WONDER 



ber." Goethe and Balzac were great som- 
nambulists who in a dream wrote hastily 
and feverishly what they thought they saw, 
then went back to bed again. Poe's soul 
never awakened to a single reality. From 
the ebon vaults of the Unconscious it stole 
upon a world of toppling shadows, ashen 
days and vaporous, opiate sallows. In- 
stead of universal law he felt the universal 
awe, and his life was a meditation on 
shadows. 

Walt Whitman had but to name a thing 
and straightway that thing became a mys- 
tery. This solid-seeming and substantial 
world he made to reel and hung the mystic 
glamour of his soul upon the ant. He saw 
no greater mystery than the hair on the 
back of his hand, and he said that "a glance 
of the eye shall confound the science of all 
time." 

The plodding fact-grubber crawls upon 
a rim like a fly on a vase, but the mystic 
is the light within. 

To those who walk the world with open 
eyes yet see not — those bald realists who 
believe that when you have named a star 
you have explained it — ideas stand for 
things. But to the mystic things stand for 



WONDER 29 



ideas. They translate particulars into gen- 
erals. Goethe drew the universe into his 
soul, and his dying words were, "More 
Light." He had translated all things into 
thoughts and all thoughts into visions, and, 
standing of all men of the century on the 
pinnacle of the spirit, he still stood in the 
dark. The light he had was just great 
enough to show him the impenetrability of 
the darkness beyond and around. But he 
fared forth with Wonder in his soul. 

The mystics in philosophy, literature and 
art do not differ essentially in any age. 
Environment cannot touch them. Knowl- 
edge comes — and goes; the mystic lingers. 
He is above time and clime, and the 
"modern investigators" are ancient crooners 
that shall be. Heraclitus or Maeterlinck, 
Lucretius or Tolstoi, Spinoza or Thomas 
Hardy, Sir Thomas Browne or Amiel, 
Buddha or Carlyle, Shelley or D'Annunzio 
— their premise is everlastingly the same: 
Shadows that emerge from a Void, scud 
across the earth, some in fury, some in 
pallid calm — and then the Void again. A 
ring, a circle; an arc of consciousness, an 
arc of sleep ; an emergence and a disappear- 
ance — like that illusion of stagecraft where- 



30 WONDER 



in fifty men, by marching in a circle before 
and behind the scenery, simulate an in- 
finite host — that is life. 

These solemn-suited Brethren of Wonder 
dwell in the husk of things, but are not of 
the husk. They are wizard souls glaring 
through the lattice of dreams, praying 
sceptics immured in the Tomb with the 
Black Panels. Their type of face is the 
face of Percy Bysshe Shelley — the Angel 
Israfel in flesh. 



THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 

THE refinements of civilization are 
more dangerous than the frank 
brutalities of savagery; it is a sub- 
stitution of the serpent for the prowling 
man-eater; the substitution of an insidious 
corruption for a ceaseless battle in the day- 
light. In a state of nature the weakest go 
to the wall; in a state of over-refined civil- 
ization both the weak and the strong even- 
tually go to the wall. 

Civilization is the last refinement of the 
herding instinct. All weakness is centri- 
petal. Strength is centrifugal. The "so- 
cial instinct" is a phase of fear. 

As Nietzsche has pointed out, our "rights" 
are our mights — that is, the thing we have 
the power to do (if there go along with 
it the power to immunize oneself from 
penalty) we do; in fact, must do. Govern- 
ment imposes penalties on those who trans- 
gress its ordinances— that is, it opposes 
power with power ; escapes a pain by pre- 

(31) 



32 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 

scribing one. The excuse made is that "the 
welfare of the whole race" is at stake — that 
is, organized society must forever make 
war on minorities. And yet, if our view 
take in a great space of time, we see these 
minorities becoming majorities and the 
majorities passing into minorities. When 
the latter are ensconsed in power they, 
forgetting their former "rights" as minor- 
ities, use exactly the same methods to per- 
petuate themselves as did their enemies, 
now their prey. 

The law of gravitation is the only dis- 
coverable moral law in the universe. Gravi- 
tation is involved in every "right." Without 
gravitation the words good and evil could 
not exist; we could have no attractions and 
repulsions. The things to which I am at- 
tracted and which are attracted to me — 
those things I have a "right" to; they are 
my veiled destinies, my veritable selves. A 
"right" springs from a need, and need is 
the ethical equivalent of the physical law of 
gravitation. 

The obstacles that stand in the path of 
my inexorable attractions must die — or else 
slay me. It is merely a question of which 
is the stronger, not whose is the trespass. 



THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 33 

Strength and Strength's will is the supreme 
ethic. All else are dreams from hospital 
beds, the sly goodness of weak souls. 

It is the weak man who urges compro- 
mise — never the strong man. A weak man 
is one who has not the courage of his gravi- 
tations; a strong man is the converse of 
this. Power knows no evil but the threat- 
ened destruction of itself. 

The essence of willing is self-destruction 
— and aggression; self -exploitation cannot 
be conceived of except as aggression. A 
society prospers materially in so far as 
each individual aggresses on the other. It 
is called "Business." The problem is how 
to subtilize it. "Immorality" is the essence 
of "progress." There is, it is true, a com- 
mon sense that "holds a fretful realm in 
awe." But it is no more "moral" than 
gravitation or the centrifugal and centri- 
petal forces that preserve the orbit of the 
planet. It is a mechanical law with social 
implications. 

This element of warfare is so deeply rooted 
in the nature of things — it is so absolutely 
a necessity if the universe is to continue 
to exist— that Nature in order to perpet- 
uate herself everlastingly invents opposites 



34 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 

to attain her ends. Thus love. Affection 
is one of the World-Spirit's devices for 
more effectually carrying on her war of 
part against part. It is a minor device in 
the Great Method. Woman is the strong 
man's recreation; or, in cosmic language, 
after depletion, replenishment. 

Supreme happiness engenders not only 
the feeling of exalted well-being in our- 
selves but an overmastering desire to make 
others suffer by either forcibly imposing 
our happiness upon them or tantalizingly 
parading it before their eyes. Or the su- 
premely happy may show the masked cru- 
elty of this state by patronizing those in 
pain — by creating obligations, to be col- 
lected in the form of charity-kisses when 
their own painful season comes on. To 
prey — to prey — that is our essence. If we 
cannot be powerful and happy and prey 
on others we invent conscience and prey on 
ourselves* 

Have you divined the secret thoughts 
of those who privily pride themselves on 
their life of self-sacrifice? — how, finding 
none to pat them on the back, they fabri- 
cate in their own souls a Greater than they 
who tells them each night: "Well done, my 



THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 35 

servant." Ah! the compliments this mystic 
being pays them! In spite of their smug, 
dutiful countenances they, too, have their 
bloated ego for companionship. They must 
find a reward somewhere for their self- 
slaughter. So intoxicated do they become 
in their self-adulations, so hysterically 
happy are these beings with their flagellant 
rites that they seek to impose their beatifi- 
cation on others. So they invented Christ 
and pass "Christian laws." 

Humanity cannot escape its origins; it 
admires force more than "goodness." It 
will applaud power unallied to moral prin- 
ciples, but never moral principles unallied 
to power. It loves the bold, though the 
bold be "bad." 

Only in the fury of excess does one catch 
glimpses of the immortal truths. Ah! the 
divine excess in great things — the excess 
that shot Mont Blanc toward the stars, the 
excess of life-force that sent Byron flaming 
through Europe, the excess that flung Ver- 
laine into the gutter! They who keep the 
balances live long — and see nothing. 

No two men's environments are the same 
because no two men's mental states are the 
same. Environment is a series of mental 



36 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 

states superposed on a hypothetical world. 
Environment is not "the sum of the forces 
which surround you," but the sum of the 
illusions which fire your brain. 

All suffering is caused by an obstacle in 
the path of a force. See that you are not 
your own obstacle. 

All willing is not necessarily a willing 
into fuller life, but it is invariably a willing 
away from death. Man gives little thought 
to his destination so long as he can remain 
out of reach of his Pursuer. 

The right to live has never been proved 
except by the murderer and the thief. 

There are countless reasons, no doubt, 
why we should not be evil, but it is impos- 
sible to think of a single rational reason 
why we should be "good." "Goodness" does 
not necessarily bring health, wealth, wisdom 
or peace of mind. Rather is it a smiling 
martyrdom. 

The joy of the savage who has slain his 
enemies, the joy of the ascetic-saint who 
has slain his instinctive nature are both 
derived from the same source, the pleasure 
of putting something to death. 

If all Christians were like Christ there 
would be no necessity for Christianity; for 



THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 37 

when once we have achieved absolutely and 
in every particular our object, our passion, 
our dream, the motives that urged us on to 
that consummation disappear, and we are 
left in exactly the same predicament from 
which we wriggled. There is no Utopia 
that would be worth living in for a single 
month. Unless you are prepared for pain, 
prepared to kill, skirt precipices and be 
killed, you will always remain a decadent, 
i. e., an idealist, a sick man. 

The Christian "Kingdom of God," where 
the weak, the stunted, the underfed and the 
outcasts shall riot and roister and gorge 
and swill and blaspheme at the strong 
earth-man singing his deathless war-chant 
in the hell-pits of strife! 

There is no rising from lower to higher 
in social systems — there is only a constant 
redistribution of mediocrity, a thinning or 
a thickening of the crust beneath which 
glows the passion for liberty. 

When society no longer exists for the wel- 
fare of the individual both must go, but the 
individual will be the last to disappear be- 
cause he was the first to appear. Hence 
to live for others to the exclusion of self 
tends to the annihilation of both. But to 



38 THE ALMIGHTINESS OF MIGHT 

live for self to the exclusion of others does 
not necessarily tend to the annihilation of 
both the individual and society, for it is 
easier to conceive of the existence of a single 
individual without society than it is to con- 
ceive of society without a single individual. 

Wherever "justice" has righted a wrong 
it has wronged a right. 

The social system is maintained by oppos- 
ing one vice to another ; it is a balance main- 
tained by bogus weights. The aggressive 
instincts of the individual are held in check 
by the threatened aggression of many in- 
dividuals. 



THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 

LIFE is a manifestation of uncon- 
scious ideas, a flowerlike exfolia- 
tion from an unseen, unknown 
within to a visible, known without, of which 
death is the rim. 

The mind, the earlier mind, of man, half 
opened, as a flower just before dawn, be- 
holding, fearing, this rim — this almost tan- 
gible cessation of the activities of the be- 
loved body — reacts upon itself in thought, 
seeking blindly for something of the in- 
finite beyond matter; dreaming thus of 
gaining for mental, spiritual intensity what 
so soon must be lost in space and time; 
asking, as it were, a concession from Fate 
by a steady withdrawal from participation 
in her more obvious empire, the external 
world. 

So is the dream born; and from the un- 
mapped territories in the atoms in the brain 
there springs a being within a being — the 
imaginative-prophetic soul, forerunner of 

(39) 



40 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 

the Intangible Life, the subverter and 
sapper of the external world, a thing that 
shall function in the limitless. 

To beings so elected — few and unique 
among those who live literally, the mud- 
worms — the nearest thing is the remotest 
thing. They are never quite socketted in 
their environment, never quite come into 
contact with their own bodies. Extension, 
encounter and impact of bodily things are 
not true for them. They stand with one 
hand upon the door-bolt, about to go forth 
from their enchanted souls into the grooves 
of practical life; but they never make the 
motion that is decisive. Merely they stand 
there to listen apperceptively, or they peer 
through the knot-hole of sense at the elabo- 
rate rituals of buffoonery. 

Standing farther away from life, they 
stand nearer to that which gives life; mov- 
ing not anywhere, they are everywhere. 
They are never real in the sense that a 
wall is real, being at most mere effigies of 
flesh and blood leashed to a Vision. 

They have for environment all that is 
conceivable, all that is scooped into the nets 
of imagination and intelligence from the 
abysses of the unsounded inland sea — things 



THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 41 

strange, things chastened by ages of im- 
mobility and deep-sea lave, residue of lost 
worlds, and things still alive reaching 
through the tangled treasure of the soul 
hands that grip, forcing through to the day 
the short, agonized utterance of the baffled. 
And, in rarer moments, they are environed 
by the inconceivable — by those bare hints 
that are the souls of the great unuttered 
poems, and by those stranger epiphanies 
that amaze, illuminate and destroy sense's 
last belief in sense. 

One may pick the world apart, pick it 
to its last shred of matter; but it is pre- 
cisely here that life — the inexplicable, un- 
analyzable, intangible roots of matter — 
begins, and the scalpel must abdicate in 
favor of the imagination, the winged intel- 
ligence. 

Imagination is a spurt from the depths 
of Being, a swirling geyser that gravitates 
to a zenith set in the infinite. 

Memory cannot take us beyond ourselves, 
cannot carry us further than the experiences 
of our special form of existence; it moves 
in limits always. But in the mystic imagi- 
nation will be found the fragmentary 
records of pasts long swallowed up, the 



42 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 

shining dust of worlds crumbled beyond 
possibility of reintegration, the whirling, 
blazing meteoric stones flung from the 
wrecks of incalculably remote selves. 

Some golden minute overlooked in Time's 
monstrous hour, a miraculous survival in 
the impersonal memory of a wonder-time, 
ungarnered of Oblivion: such magical 
visitors come to the bedside of the ever- 
dying body! For the Eternal Dreamer, 
which is the soul of man, never dies, though 
dreams themselves are made of perishables. 

We dreamed as impulse and desire in 
our parents and are lured into our bodies 
by vague imaginings, urged from husk to 
husk by the impetus of Karma, the spirits 
of accumulated past acts. Whatever one 
dreams tends to beget a body, and what we 
are now is old dream come to be the phan- 
tasm of place, ancestral imagination turned 
brain and sinew and blood. 

The divinizing imagination can detach 
itself from this present crucible wherein 
it flows for a day and plunge into that age- 
less past, circumventing the shameful quick- 
ness of life, superposing on the sullen mys- 
tery of death the greater miracle of con- 
tinuity through perpetual effacement. 



THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 43 

Inundating me, I am back-rendered to 
the things I was, fore-rendered to the things 
I must be, resolving in a single eye-shot my 
marvellous complexities into their simples; 
beholding in this vile impulse the ravin of 
some old fatality: recognizing in this im- 
medicable wound in the soul the work of 
the Avenger who seeks out the unbalanced 
and the impenitent — the old wolf with shin- 
ing tooth who prowls and whelps forever in 
the souls of us ! 

Imagination is thus the menstruum of all 
materials, and the poet in his contempla- 
tions gathers up this world in his brain as 
one gathers waters in the hand. It was 
Alexander who sat down and wept because 
there were no more worlds to conquer. Had 
he been a devotee of the Intangible Life 
he would have wept because he could not 
conquer all the worlds he saw. 

Only the poet can track Time back to 
its source, only the mystic is permitted to 
step out of space or to lift the veil of the 
uncircumstanced, where images fail, but 
imagination still leads, where the guess is 
the only certainty, where logic is nursery 
block-building. He is the live king in the 
catacombs of matter; the mummy that has 



44 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 

split its wrappings and wings away. He 
dislodges, disturbs, seeing in Law merely 
the method of miracles. 

Not where I am, but where I dream — 
there am I. 

When the sword is absent from the sheath 
what matter where the sheath dangles? 

My body may be beside you, but I may 
not be there — nor anywhere where that 
body could follow. All our troubles come 
from standing too close to our skins. The 
sword becomes bitten by the acids that cor- 
rode the scabbard. Sorrow is often only 
an error of vision. 

Imagination is a form of hunger. Ani- 
mals have little imagination because they 
are easily satisfied — food and sexual gra- 
tification are all they require. The most 
powerful imaginations are found in the un- 
happy. Poverty drives genius to the Intan- 
gible Life or brigandage. All great imag- 
inative art is a transcript of world-sorrow, 
a record of things imperfect. All art is 
a record of the Intangible Life, a confes- 
sion of the inadequacy of action. Nature 
has, in the intellect of man, bred her foe. 
She has in her blind willing willed her doom. 
There is always a tendency in the intellec- 



THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 45 

tual mind to reject the things of sense, or 
to use them merely to further the ends of 
understanding. And the more the brain 
understands the less the body lusts. 

The intellect is religious: it demands a 
rational universe. No end that is merely 
a rebeginning can be a rational end. 

The imagination — the eye of the intellect 
— strains its orbs in search of another kind 
of eternity than that in which we lie quite 
helpless. And on her retina there is a tiny 
shadow of the Reality. 

Certain beings there are who seem to be 
doing a work in some other sphere, to be 
occupied elsewhere, to be mere shadowy 
visitants of earth, looking on things about 
them as clumsy forgeries of something 
divinely writ — writ on other and finer 
parchments than stone and earth and wave. 
That feeling of walking in a "world unreal- 
ized" is no poetic myth, but the actual daily 
experience of a type of mind not so rare 
as most believe. It is direct contact with 
Reality, the everlasting mood of the Un- 
changeable. 

It is the secret of the Intangible Life, 
this contact with the great scene-shifter; 



46 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 

and perpetual melancholy is given for its 
birthmark. 

The agony of those on whom has fallen the 
Infinite! of those doomed to sit up to their 
eyes in the brack of this world and to feel 
that above the eyes they are bathed by the 
waters that flow nowhither from out the 
nowhere. These centaurs of the mud and 
of the azure cannot take the common part, 
yet they cannot reject it wholly. Cakes 
and ale and the hair-shirt they spurn; cakes 
and ale and the hair-shirt are theirs still. 
Their brooding, wistful faces peer across 
the sills of the House of Revels and they 
pass on, unallied, aliens beneath an alien 
sun. To them the shoulders of Time seem 
overweighted, forever and forever holding 
up this accumulating burden of evil, this 
daily increment of deed and dream, this per- 
petual transference of today's burdens to 
the shoulders of endless reluctant tomor- 
rows. 

The abstract mind, with its dower of 
imaginative sight, swallows up all its im- 
pulses toward practical life. Why should 
a man do anything when all that is done 
changes in the doing? Our own motions 
generate the cataracts that carry us to- 



THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 47 

ward life. The whole universe changes in 
the moment of contemplation. There is 
a dying and a resurrection of each thing 
and all things each second. Into that bot- 
tomless sea of the Infinite there tumble all 
stars, all peoples, all pleasant ways, all 
bitter memories, all sub-human and super- 
human compounds, all the organized 
shadows which we call things. 

The being gnawed by this monstrous, in- 
visible super-concept is something of a god. 
There is no rest for him night or day: 
come spring, come autumn; come birth, 
come death — it is all to him as though it 
were not. For over and under and round 
about he sees, like the Ancient Mariner, 
Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life, and 
things visit his ear dully and life slides by 
like distant shores seen through a tropic 
haze — himself caught in the debris, half of 
him gravitating toward the Viewless, the 
other half full socketted in matter. 

Matter! There are those who have done 
away with that clog. If one stay long 
enough with inorganic, inanimate things, 
concentrate his thought on their inertness, 
their deadly calm, one becomes curiously 
aware of something bordering on semi- 



48 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 

intelligible expectancy in their attitudes. 
The table, bed, chair in a room, under this 
mental surveillance, will become half- 
create. These dumb things, somehow, as- 
sume an air of questioning watchfulness — 
as of embryons about to receive the spark 
that will stir their limbs and engender move- 
ment. Motion and rest seem one thing, and 
the Reality underlying each comes out 
stark. 

Mind and matter are one thing operating 
in two ways under one primal impulse — 
the impulse of appetite. There is a passion 
of change in matter, and one of the results 
of this passion has been the production of 
mind. Matter is the subsidence of passion, 
mind in the gross state. 

If it were not for the principle of decay — 
that is, the principle of evanescing change — 
we should be able to see a tree become a 
man in the evolutionary series before our 
very eyes and the solidest boulder trans- 
form itself into a crying baby. 

It was with this knowledge that Walt 
Whitman apostrophised a tree as "Thou un- 
told life of me!" No man's life is long 
enough nor his instruments of perception 
keen enough to behold this translation. The 



THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 49 

imagination alone conceives it and knows 
that it is so. The passion of Pygmalion 
made of the statue of Galatea a breath- 
ing, living woman. The legend is eternally 
true. The living are the dead made mani- 
fest; and the so-called dead are the living 
unmanifest. 

Every word we utter is but the utterance 
of a drowsy phantom in our blood, the open- 
ing of the lips of a spectre. For this reason 
in rare moments of self-consciousness our 
voice sounds strange, far away, not ours. 
It is the sudden perception of that great 
truth: We are not ourselves. 

The human soul, the Eternal Substance, 
is the immortal Spectator and placid Ob- 
server of the endless recurrence of its own 
shadows. Thought is the endless recurrence 
of its dreams; movement the endless recur- 
rence of its method. At the end of un- 
imaginably vast cycles of time the Soul 
swallows its own consciousness and draws 
back into itself its shadows, which we call 
matter; its dreams, which we call thought; 
its method, which we call motion. And all 
that was lies dormant in the Nought, a 
possibility of Nothing. It is the Sabbath 
of works and days. The Eternal Substance 



50 THE INTANGIBLE LIFE 

lives as a desire, and shadows and dreams 
and motion are born again, and the endless 
bitter burdens are taken up once more. 

The native interior sense, the quick ap- 
prehension of the soul of things, some sud- 
den rebirth in the brain of knowledge that 
had long lain dormant — this is the most 
marvellous of human possessions. He who 
has it in large measure may skip all learn- 
ing, for he has wisdom; and wisdom is the 
instinct for values — a lightning in the soul 
that strikes the husk of illusion from the 
kernel of eternality and lays bare the essen- 
tial. 

The deepest wisdom has nothing to do 
with facts, with accuracy, with proof, cor- 
roboration. Wisdom is the Fact. It is the 
gift of the Intangible Life. 



THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 

TO wish for the fulfilment of your 
desire — that is childish. To fear the 
fulfilment of your desire — that is 
the beginning of spiritual senility. To de- 
sire not to desire — that is wisdom. 

All great negations are at last splendid 
affirmations. We renounce by desiring not 
to have, and to say, "I refrain" is really 
to say, "I will not to will." This is the 
humor of all great refusals. We reject 
the pennies because we covet the gold 
pieces, and spurn brown bread for the 
manna that may fall to us. There is a 
latent Yea in each great Nay. 

Absolute renunciations cannot be con- 
ceived. We forsake the worse for the 
better, the gutter for the stars, counterfeit 
days for real days, the senses for the super- 
senuous. The dominating instinct can only 
be overcome by a dominating instinct. We 
are the gibes of an eternal Will. Turn 
wheresoever we may we cannot escape it. 

(51) 



52 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 

When we give it battle we are most its bond- 
man. It smiles back at us from the end of 
our swords, and when we flee from it, it is 
both pursuer and pursued. 

The militant renunciants, from the 
Buddha to Schopenhauer, have been the 
founders of powerful movements — power- 
ful negations, if one likes — strenuous nays. 
These flesh-walled prisons were too narrow 
for the mighty lusts of their souls; this spin- 
ning green pebble was too small a stage 
for their spirit-strut. They counselled renun- 
ciation here for a mightier life "elsewhere." 
They would lay waste the temporal order 
with the flaming fagots of their dreams, let 
loose the thirst-parched hounds of endless 
desire from their kennels of clay, rip the 
mask from the minute, drain eternity of its 
secrets, and plant their streamers of affirma- 
tion on the last cosmic ruin. Renunciation! 
There is no such thing. No is a transfig- 
ured Yes. Renunciations are the cocoons 
in which the delicate silk of our finer de- 
sires is spun. 

The process of evolution, the whole of 
that marvellous exfoliation from the amoeba 
to Thomas Hardy, is a process of "renun- 
ciation," a progressive leaving behind, a 



THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 53 

sloughing off, an endless denial, an eternal 
series of terminations that are beginnings, 
and beginnings that are only valuable be- 
cause they record terminations. The uni- 
verse is eternally dying in order to live. 
We give up what we must when we must. 
A deeper necessity than our likes and dis- 
likes commands. We flower in pain. We 
are exiles forever on the march to a Siberia 
whose terrors are purely imaginative. 

All thought is action renounced. The 
elaborated brain of a Newton, the burrow- 
ing mental eye of a Shakespeare, the flame- 
crowned dreams of a Keats — all record the 
inbreedings of the spirit. The finer, the 
higher life begins with a veto. Each new 
law repeals an old one, and when we have 
discovered the illusiveness of days we reso- 
lutely cancel the world in contemplation, 
and "renounce" our hobbyhorses for Pega- 
sus. 

Action is characteristic of life on the in- 
stinctive plane. A will-less inaction can be 
reached only by the few. The centers of 
inhibition develop late in life. With our 
hand on that switchboard we may wreck 
with a smile the blind, plunging impulses. 
The iron-heeled spirit listens with pride 



54 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 

to the crackling of the bones of dead selves 
over which it stalks in grim-humorous de- 
fiance — those selves of a million yeas; those 
luring, seductive selves tricked out in a mil- 
lion guises, that solicit him by night, by 
day — selves born of a myriad lapses in a 
myriad lives. 

Procession, concession, recession — the 
defiant "Forward!" "Forward!" of youth, 
the compromises of half -disillusioned middle 
life; the "peccavi!" of old age — that is the 
psychical history of the average being — 
the average being who only learns that life 
is pure hallucination after going through 
the horrors, who has no organ of divination, 
who does not believe in sewage until he has 
swum through a sewer. He renounces 
when there is nothing left to renounce. He 
confounds renunciation with death. And 
Tolstoi is his prophet. 

How few have learned the art of with- 
drawing from life noiselessly and yet with 
dignity! On a day you have discovered the 
mockery of it all; some curious and swiftly 
knit suspicion has given you courage to rip 
the wrappings from your universe, and you 
behold where you thought to find God — 
bah! — a Cagliostro! You announce from the 



THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 55 

market place your discovery. A million 
voices hiss in your ear "Traitor!" The 
totter-kneed gods on their pasteboard 
thrones crack their whips at you. But they 
avail not. You have become the spirit of 
revolt and you will lay the world in the 
dust. You have seen the core of creation 
and the vacuity thereof. You have beheld 
as in a vision the sinister Soul of things 
and the grin thereon; and you strike back 
in blind rage at the lies sacrosanct with 
age that enmesh you. 

Your rage is useless, admirable, asinine. 
Spinoza glanced at the bill-of-fare, threw 
it out of the window and took to lens-grind- 
ing. Quit the stews without noise; thus only 
may one keep the beasts off his trail. 

Tomorrow, that million-spired mirage- 
city toward which the soul of man forever 
wends its way; Tomorrow, with myrrh and 
spice in her casket, her fingers tipped with 
healing ointment for the wounds inflicted by 
this unromantic, calendared today — To- 
morrow can be won only by wooing Today. 
How few can renounce the next Now! Yet 
that way alone lies wisdom. We live be- 
tween-times, and nothing is. We are noc- 
tambulists forever stepping off into space. 



56 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 

We live between the minutes, in the mythic 
state that separates and yet unites a here 
and beyond. We never quite touch our ob- 
jects, never close wholly the hand on the 
object of our desire. Always the essential 
escapes — the essence flies just above oar 
heads. The St. Elmo fire of perpetual illu- 
sion flits around us, and we are our own 
undoing. 

We seek for a spirit of rationality in 
things and do not find it because the seek- 
ing is itself irrational. Renounce the pur- 
suit of things and those things will glide 
silently into your soul. Seek not and ye 
shall find : Let us dig where we stand — there 
is gold under our feet; the future is a 
pocket, and the fine glint on the outposts 
of things is but the phosphorescent reflec- 
tion from the corpses of dead pasts on a 
vacuous perspective. 

There is a fine irony embedded in the 
spectacle of this unending chase through 
fen and forest : bloodhounds on the scent of 
eagles and butterflies; arrows, poison 
tipped, sent hurtling after fireflies; vast 
armies accoutred to the knees, making 
forced marches to reach Cockayne. 

Ring, Olympus, with thy eternal laugh- 



THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 57 

ter! for the solemnity of man is the comedy 
of the gods! 

The born renunciant's elaborated appa- 
ratus of inhibition is a labor-saving device. 
He skips the living of life in order to at- 
tain a life that lives. It is not necessary 
to experience in order to know. Some 
souls hold the universe in solution at birth. 
Their lives are excursions of verification. 
They inventory the universe at a glance 
and divert their lusts toward the stars. 
Thrust into Eternity's Black Hole with its 
three dimensions of Time, Space and Cir- 
cumstance, they disdain the wall-feeling, 
wall-pounding and clamoring of their fel- 
low-prisoners. Instead they fix their eyes 
on the white splendor of the dome — and 
wait. The Keepers find their bodies rigid 
in calm, a placid mock upon their faces. 
Amid the babel their souls have passed out 
through the little wicket in the great white 
dome — passed into — well, what matter? 

Life is a lewd game of tag played by I 
Want and Catch Me. 

In the last analysis our acts are but the 
combustions of cells big with voids. And 
our dreams are inbreedings — the obscene 
junctions of impotent potentialities. Under- 



58 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 

standing is the organ wherewith we finally 
comprehend that nothing is. Discrimination 
is that fine sense that places the dead fish 
in one pile and the maggots that feed on 
them in another. The passions are brewed 
in the cardiac vats and their steam singes 
and scorches the body with their senseless 
urgings. 

Life! a butchers' picnic in the Alhambra; 
a column-cracked, half -foundered Venice; 
a vermin-ridden Arcady. 

Those fine young seers, "the predestined," 
who walk out of the gates of birth and with 
swift and sure step dart to the center of 
the banquet-room and overturn the grub- 
table without tasting the edible junk have 
abridged their lives, it is true, but what 
they have missed they shall never feel the 
need of. They might have eaten, you say, 
and then judged. Satiety is the hog's 
judgment. Renunciation ex post facto is 
fashionable; besides, there are so many 
spiritual Baden-Badens where one may 
have his maw washed clean. Real renun- 
ciants are born, not tolstoied. 

The Intellect is the mirror of Passion. 
She looks into that wondrous glass and 
murmurs: "The same — yet I cannot touch 



THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 59 

thee. You are my higher self shaped as a 
face in smoke. I gave thee birth; you fol- 
low me; antic me and are my slave — my 
pale and wondrous slave, as ethereal as I 
am gross; my slave to whose beauty I ren- 
der thy shackles." Intellect, forged in the 
foundries of desire, that is destined to strike 
down the arm that poured it molten in the 
brain matrices and gouge out the eye that 
watched it cool to undestanding. It is the 
Moses born amid the bulrushes and tangled 
weeds of elemental passion — this mighty 
Moses, light-smitten with Horebic visions, 
bringing to the groundlings who will listen 
a new tablet of laws. 

Every fine action implies or characterizes 
some aspect of self -conquest, which is an- 
other name for renunciation. Every fine 
action is such because, fundamentally, it 
is a negation; some door must be shut be- 
fore we open another. Life opens outward 
to an inward. "I have gained on myself," 
murmurs the dreamer when he feels the life 
energies boiling within him, and with the 
sure hand of him who controls the powers 
generated by Niagara Falls he directs those 
energies into the channels mapped out on 
the dream parchment of his mind. None 



60 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 

but those who have experienced it know 
of that virile joy, that bounding rapture, 
of the spirit that deliberately smiles a de- 
fiant no to some old lure, some petty, tran- 
sitory tickle, and hears in his ear the long 
halloa! of congratulation from somewhere 
up the heights. 

There is nothing in the world that is not 
worth having, but there is nothing in the 
world that is worth lifting the hand to ob- 
tain. We pay too much for our prizes; we 
are the eternal dupes of the imagination. 
An Epicurean receptivity, the desire to 
know, to feel, to assimilate all things — with 
a semi-humorous reservation as to the value 
of the things received; a keen discernment 
of the prankishness that reigns at the heart 
of things; the ability to outlaw what you 
cannot get; a looking without a lusting, 
or to lust with one's hand on the valve; an 
alien attitude toward joy, so when she 
comes it is with the surprise of unexpected 
good news — something of calm, some meas- 
ure of surcease from the terror of days may 
be won in thus fronting life. 

Man makes of his will the measure of his 
demands. The dream versus the brutal 
fact! — the theme of the finest tragedy and 



THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 61 

comedy. What incongruity I — a Hottentot 
marooned on an iceberg, or an Esquimau 
gravely assuring himself that the desert is 
frigid. Man is capable of believing any- 
thing but the truth. Adaptability is the 
process by which one gets used to the use- 
lessness of things. 

The intellectual renunciant, the pure 
sceptic who has minimized the personal 
equation in his quest for rationality (which 
is, again, some principle that will coddle a 
temperamental bias) assumes all truths to 
be lies and all lies aspects of some truth. 
His universal premise is the denial of all 
premises — each premise being but the 
termination of some anterior syllogism. But 
he has faith: he assumes chaos. He rips 
from himself all the tatters of mental cus- 
tom and aims at an oversight. His is what 
Nietzsche contemptuously called "the im- 
maculate perception." The contradictori- 
ness of things lies open to his vision. Im- 
pact, shudder, dispersion, recombination in 
endless forms new and strange; this is his 
ultimate formula, and beyond — the Black 
Panel. What "highest" shall he choose in 
this flowing frustration? In an evanescing 
universe what shall he waylay that will give 



62 THE IRONY OF NEGATIVES 

him more satisfaction than himself? He 
turns within and chants with Walt Whit- 
man, "Me imperturbe." So he stands at 
pause at the cross-roads, and life swirls in 
and out of these highways at his feet. He 
takes no road. The view is finer from the 
forks. Besides, he has his secret. 



HISTORY 

THE pomp of many mythical yester- 
days — that is history. History must 
be lived; it cannot be written. All 
the paper in the world could not contain 
the events of a minute. 

As all the events of the past are saturated 
with the imagination, written history is the 
annal of man's illusions. The past is the 
one thing we create at each minute. It is 
the one thing that is revocable. It is the 
one thing we can create in our own image. 
There are as many Luthers, as many Napo- 
leons, as many Robespierres as there are 
minds that think of them. The battle of 
Waterloo is no more important than you 
believe it is. Cromwell was a murderer or 
a saint — you are the judge. There are no 
facts; there are only beliefs. There is no 
past; there is only the kaleidoscope of the 
imagination. There is no history; there is 
only myth. 

In that back-travelling glance the trivial 

(63) 



64 HISTORY 

becomes grandiose; the stupendous is 
rounded off with the reservations of crit- 
icism. And this stained-glass hero who to- 
day stands all a-glitter in the magic of my 
thought tomorrow I shall hurl into the ditch 
of disillusion and cover with the quicklime 
of venomous ridicule. 

"Have you read history?" Some one once 
asked me. "No," I replied. "I have never 
even read historians." 

Tell me the secret of the violet and I 
will tell you the secret of God, a poet said. 
Tell me the secret of this minute and I will 
tell you the secret of all minutes. And 
until you can tell me what that event means 
which you call yourself I can tell you 
nothing of the meaning of history. I do not 
know that I am not a myth. So what can 
I affirm of Caesar? Livy and Tacitus, 
Gibbon and Carlyle reported their own 
dreams, analyzed their own imaginations 
and wrote down themselves. The only 
archives from which they drew treasures 
were the countless cells in the brain, and 
their Messalinas and Hannibals and Mira- 
beaus are as purely mythical as the Homeric 
gods. 

The hot, steaming imagination throws 



HISTORY 65 



off its moons which it calls its "facts." 
Grote had an idea, and that idea had an 
echo, and he called it Greece. Is there a 
history of England? No. There are 
Hallam's England, and Green's England, 
and Macaulay's England. 

Each man is the conscript of his tem- 
perament. We know the lying mask that 
Memory draws over the face of each par- 
ticular yesterday. And those infinite faded 
yesterdays! Who shall unmask them shall 
write history! They are the monstrous pil- 
lars that stretch away into the Infinite, 
each crowned with its separate Sphinx, each 
with its separate riddle, each veined with 
countless hieroglyphics. 

History is not fascinating, and indeed has 
no reason for being, until some supremely 
great poetic liar — a Shakespeare, a Hugo, 
or a Dumas — recreates it for us; or until 
some seer blows into its body a fictitious 
soul which he calls a philosophic theory. 
The historian must have a migratory imagi- 
nation. He puts clothes on ghosts. He is 
the tailor of dead men. The past is his 
clinic and he demonstrates over his own 
Frankensteins. 

History is, then, like the visible universe 



66 HISTORY 



itself, a fable of the imagination. What I 
see there is there. To me it is merely an 
excuse for setting down some thoughts on 
the evolution of man. 

All events from the first appearance of 
man on the planet to the writing of these 
words constitute an Iliad of ghastly jests. 
Man is the anonymous atom. He is one 
of the masks of the Supernatural. The 
aspirations of races are born in Venetian 
pomp. They all end in a Verdun. That 
is the satiric repartee of our Antagonist 
hidden behind the arras. The history of a 
particular race is merely that race's ante- 
mortem statement to posterity, which holds 
an autopsy on its ancestor, and starts to 
write its own ante-mortem statement. 

The history of mankind! Listenl — and 
you shall hear the forlorn music made by 
drowsy Ghosts on violins of bronze. 

History has a metaphysic. It is the will- 
to-persist» The will-to-persist must not be 
confused with the will-to-power of Nietzsche 
or the will-to-live of Schopenhauer. It 
includes both of these. It uses life and 
power in order to persist. 

The race denies death. The evolution 



HISTORY 67 



of man is the epic of Persistence. The spirit 
reaches out for a Beyond at each of its 
movements. To be Other, to be Elsewhere, 
to be in the place where one is not — that 
is the primal instinct. 

Not to be is the only hell man ever 
feared. Not to move is the only monstrous 
thought that can be thought. Not to per- 
sist is the only blasphemy that repels him. 
And all the torment of existence flows 
from this will-to-persist, this inexplicable 
need of going — on. Lashed, branded, 
stoned, bludgeoned, kicked and cuffed from 
hell to hell, spat upon by nature, vomited 
back into life from out the ground where he 
is laid, man fears but one thing: Boredom — 
the boredom of eternal extinction. And the 
knick-knack Gods and the sublime gib- 
berish of prayer and that vulgar scuffle 
from territory to territory which is called 
the "march of progress" are nothing but 
the rumble and rattle of the Will-to-Persist. 

The history of the nations is the search for 
Utopia. The millennium is imminent — 
just ahead. Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, 
Japan, America — -so many multiples of the 
besetting, parasitic illusion of Man. The 



68 HISTORY 



sacred scroll containing that eternal prom- 
ise in jewelled letters unfolds before the 
march of tribes and peoples. The New 
Jerusalem is by the Tiber, on the Missis- 
sippi, on the Rhine, on the Nile. 

Into the fastnesses of their dreams there 
never comes a prowling doubt. Each peo- 
ple is the chosen people. The Capitol is 
the Ark of the Covenant. Sidon, Tyre, 
Alexandria, Athens, Rome, Paris, London, 
Washington are the shining Ararats where 
the tempest-tossed shall lodge in peace at 
last! 

History is, again, a museum of cant 
phrases. Each nation, each people, has 
its sacred syllable Om, which it repeats in 
ecstasy. They are the aphrodisiacs of na- 
tional ideals. Ah, the sublime pneumatic 
catchwords that keep the masses bowed and 
allow the preachers of "our manifest des- 
tiny" to ride them pickaback! 

Each generation stands waiting the 
apocalyptic formula, which it fingers like 
a favorite pimple. No great movement is 
legitimate until a motto is stitched into the 
minds of the masses. 

"Liberty, Equality and Fraternity," 



HISTORY 69 



"Taxation without representation is tyr- 
anny," "Remember the Maine/' "For God 
and Fatherland," "The Brotherhood of 
Man," "Onward, Christian Soldiers," 
"Making the world safe for democracy," 
these are a few decoy cries of the Ideal, 
the eternal blood-sucker, the unsurfeited 
vampire that no atom is too small to con- 
ceal and no constellation large enough for 
its traffic. 

Give me a phrase and I will create mo- 
tion in dead masses. Give me a warcry and 
I will invent a war. Give me an emblem 
and I will lead a people. Give me a device 
and I will overturn dynasties. With what 
mighty blustering epigram did Lucifer 
draw the rebellious hosts up before the face 
of God? The Reformation began when 
Luther tacked ninety-five phrases on a 
Wittenberg church-door. The millions 
who have fallen in battle from Salamis to 
Chateau-Thierry fell to perpetuate maxims, 
and those who survived were decorated with 
medals and lived forever after in the efful- 
gent light of their favorite saw. 

There is nothing more sentimental than 
war. History is all sentiment. To "create 
new values" a lie is necessary — a senti- 



70 HISTORY 



mental lie, a lie that shall be strong enough 
to found kingdoms and cathedrals, lazaret- 
tos and pension lists, inquisitions and 
Reigns of Terror. It must be strong 
enough to justify the paranoia of a Joan 
of Arc, the epilepsy of a Caesar, the sadism 
of a Robespierre, the sublime mania of a 
Napoleon, the pride of a Kaiser, the relig- 
ious fervor of a Charles the Ninth. The 
eternal cant phrase! Thy will be done 
here below and may thy monstrous charnel 
houses top Arcturus! 

The socialists are right when they say 
the fundamental question is the economic 
question. In history the whimper of the 
belly dominates. In all uprisings the 
bakeries are sacked first. The pinched 
visage of Hunger overawes the world. Food 
is the only God who has never been blas- 
phemed. There are no atheists to confront 
him. 

Man can live by bread alone. God, 
patriotism, love, religion may be spurious. 
Hunger is real. Hunger is a fang. Thirst 
is a thug. The billions who have come out 
of the earth and have gone into it were 
all bellywise. Kings and Popes fear the 



HISTORY 71 



mutinies of the Belly beyond the wrath of 
God. When the people in Rome became 
restive the public granaries were opened. 
Behind all the hubbub of the world, behind 
the purple and the cloth, behind the cata- 
clysms of history, behind the mouthings of 
the jingo gods of the masses, behind all 
the painted scenery of civilization and bar- 
barism there stands the eternal breadline. 
It is the skeleton in the closet. It is the 
abominable Fact. It is the Banquo's ghost 
at the feast of the masters. 

History knows one Superman: it is 
Lazarus. Against the animosity of the 
empty stomach Reason, Logic and Com- 
monsense are mute. It justifies every crime. 
The hollow stomach is seditious. It is apos- 
tate to every religious, social and ethical 
dogma. It is Anarch and Atheist. All his- 
tory plays satellite to Stomach. 

In the beginning was the Belly, and the 
Belly was with man, and the Belly was 
man. 

The masses! the masses! That mighty 
strangled sigh that goes into the infinite! 
The trillion-eyed being who sees nothing, 
whose life is nothing, who is just the Mass! 



72 HISTORY 

They manure the glory of the great. They 
drag the chariots of Charlemagne and 
Caesar and Napoleon into the empyrean 
and fall back into gaping graves below. 

I have watched from a star stricken 
with ague — a star that was old at the birth 
of man on the earth — the hordes that have 
lived here in this world. A meaningless 
generation. A useless fecundity. A buf- 
foonery of nature. A flood of sap. The 
stench of an enormous iniquity. Will the 
earth never cease belching! Behold the In- 
finite on parade! Behold the flaming gey- 
sers of life! The uncountable, inscrutable 
masses — pedestals of flesh and bone for the 
strong man — skulk back to oblivion, one 
crawling over the other ant-wise. The 
obscene, gluttonous, putrescent trillions — 
the eruption of some eternal subhuman 
hell. 

The masses are the paid panders of those 
notorious blackguards called great men. 
Their great men are their Cloaca Maxima. 
They are the incarnations of their criminal 
instincts, the clearing houses of their hypoc- 
risies. 

The masses without their heroes! Incon- 
ceivable. The average man in every age 



HISTORY £3 

has always been naturally a pimp. He is 
the parasitic suckling of "the man of the 
hour." His lips are forever sucking at the 
nipple of a demagogue. The stars sparkle, 
the seas surge and chant their magnificent 
litanies in his ears, the seasons blow their 
aromatic breaths into his face, cataracts of 
light falling from inconceivable heights 
lave his head — of this he sees nothing. He 
prefers to worship a Corsican blackguard, 
chant hosannahs to a spectacled monster 
born in Aix, or stand in mute adoration 
around the eloquent rump of his economic 
Kaiser. 

And at last the masses arrive at Democ- 
racy! The divine right of kings has become 
the divine right of the masses. The crown 
has been taken from the head of the ass 
and glued on the head of the ape. We pass 
from an assocracy to an apeocracy. The 
slave of five hundred million years at last 
comes to sit on a latrine (which he mis- 
takes for a throne). The meaning of the 
ages is at last promulged, the Sphinx gives 
up its secret, we have a clue to God, the 
atom discloses its reason-for-being, it is the 
ninth-month of historic gestation: the 



74 HISTORY 



masses are about to take possession of the 
planet. 

Verily now the earth belongs to the peo- 
ple. But the stars still belong to the poets. 



THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 

SPACE is the original sin; distance is 
the mother of desire. Perspective 
lends wings to the soul — and sets us 
in the mud in amaze. 

For we may not fly to that Alpine ridge 
— nor to that thought that beckons at the 
end of a mental perspective. 

Alpine ridge and mental ridge are illu- 
sions of space, aerial promontories such as 
we see on the stage — paint, cardboard and 
grease; beautiful to behold, the parent 
of an aspiration, but treacherous to land 
on. 

The pursuit of the spectres that inhabit 
distance brings us at last to the terror of 
the Infinite, to the monstrous, timeless 
thing we call Eternity. 

All philosophy is the attempt to batter 
down walls, to shatter limitations, to reach 
that utter distance called the Supreme 
Generalization, where, if the adventurer 
has the real buccaneer blood in him, he 

(75) 



76 THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 

rests in eternal contemplation, fed forever 
by his immortal distance passion. 

Or if his soul be not yet strong enough 
he flies, like Pascal, back a-trembling to 
the skirts of the concrete, brain-mangled, 
soul-shattered at what he has seen, seeking 
shelter in the pomps of the transitory. 

Philosophers are idea-drunkards. Their 
heady abstractions — the rare vintages, as it 
were, of all the illusions that clamber over 
the deathless Spirit of Things, vine twisted 
around vine — make of them lords of the 
distances, abolishing as they do, for in- 
stance, the petty difference between an ant 
and a star, between summer and winter, 
between the first man and the last man. 

It is Nature's great paradox of distance 
that a watery pulp like the brain — a mere 
thinking sponge that can be held in the 
palm of the hand — can hold within itself 
that stupendous conception of the evolution 
of man from protoplasm to what he is; can 
hold it not only in bits as scattered detail, 
but as one single idea, to be envisaged in a 
single flash of consciousness; an idea that 
in the drop of an eyelash destroys each in- 
dividual existence and solves everything in 
a law that sets all beginning and end at de- 



THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 77 

fiance, a law that requires an eternity of 
time in which to body forth the secrets of 
its deeps and uses infinite space as its 
mould. 

Approaching the monstrous — is it not? — 
that that little globe perched so oddly on 
the shoulders of Arthur Schopenhauer 
should have secreted within its circumfer- 
ence that marvellous theory of the Will — a 
menstruum that before our very eyes va- 
porizes a late substantial universe and sets 
the mind a-rocking and a-reeling in the 
limitless. Sublime paradox indeed! — the 
paradox of paradoxes. For here the lesser 
holds the greater, the unlimited is found 
secreted in the limited, the infinite in a skull ! 

The Hindu seer travelling his upward 
Path rises from prospect to prospect with 
a rapt joy blazoned on his soul, indulging 
that passion of distance, that frenetic desire 
to be lost in the Infinite, to be hub to a 
million prospects, to be the vent of Time 
and Space. 

The yogi is the divine intoxicant, an 
eater of form and matter. His hasheesh 
is distance; his ultimate the complete ab- 
sorption of himself in a buoyant, spaceless, 
timeless, shelterless Nirvana, where dis- 



78 THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 

tance has consumed distance, and where at 
last there remains only the extensionless 
Now. 

Amiel, who like Pascal, was touched — 
one may only be touched by it to retain his 
sanity — by this passion for endlessness, 
was transfixed into a lifelong inaction. 

The Infinite had petrified him. His pas- 
sion for distance ended in a passion for 
death, an ineradicable longing to escape 
from the net of this and that, from the dull 
mummeries of change, the tawdry pag- 
eantry of earth. 

The average person holds fast to the 
limited. The boundaries of the territory in 
which he strolls — for the average man never 
wanders — are as clearly marked out for 
him as the streets of his native town. He 
ambles through life the smiling prisoner 
of use-and-wont, chilled by the unfamiliar, 
the scarcely manumitted child of the cos- 
mic nurseries. He travels unsuspectingly 
the well-worn grooves of sense, his mind 
seldom expanding beyond the tip of the 
nose or the nerve-centre of the longest 
finger. He feels well-housed, safe in the 
concrete, in the very real walls of his men- 
tal abode, surrounded by his imperishable 



THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 79 

lares and penates — with his unchanging God 
of sundries in back of it all. 

The thought never enters his mind that 
that which he most firmly clutches has no 
more reality than fountain spray, is, in fact, 
a kind of coarsened ether — an equilibration 
for a little while of imponderable force; 
that the object most familiar to him is 
nothing but an externalized state of con- 
sciousness, a thing of no-name really, only 
dubbed "tree" or "house" or "chair" or 
"woman" as a kind of makeshift for our 
unalterable ignorance. 

Still, this stands — this Thing of no-name 
— in an infinite number of relations to an 
infinite number of other things, capable of 
an infinite number of destinies, with abysm 
on abysm beneath it and incommensurable 
distances ramifying in every direction from 
it. 

And yet on a day— a day ticked off, 
maybe, on his mental calendar; or, not un- 
derstanding, left slide by, hardly noted — 
this "average person," standing for a mo- 
ment on a mountain top or casting a 
glance out to sea or unconcernedly tossing 
his eye deep into the blue illusion over his 
head, is aware of a swift inquiet, a sudden 



80 THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 

arrest of being, a falling sensation such 
as he may have experienced in a nightmare. 
He has a vague glimpse of something that 
can only be described as the Nothing- 
Everything. Then he comes back in his 
body again, sound, safe, with a grip of 
death upon his world of thick cubes and 
gravitating chattels. 

He does not know exactly what hap- 
pened, but half -guesses that his soul had 
been shot some distance out of his body — 
or that his body had been suddenly shot 
from under his soul. 

The absorptive, annihilating Infinite — 
abstract of all distances — had for an in- 
calculably small space of time swept him 
away bag and baggage. The eye of his 
soul had caught for a moment on its retina 
a picture of the perdurable. 

There are some faces that intoxicate us 
with the illimitable prospects they open 
up; faces that limn interstellar distances; 
far-away faces, space-hallucinated, object- 
blind — the forehead and eye recording so 
expressively the vertiginous flights of the 
soul. 

Here, too, in these faces there is always 



a touch of the wistful, such a look as we 



ivs 



THE PASSION OF DISTANCE 81 

see on the faces of those who gaze expect- 
antly out to sea the day long; a touch of 
nostalgia. 

Be we ever so near to these beings they 
are still, we feel, so far away really that 
contact with them gives us back something 
of the uncanny. 

They bear the air of one sent on a 
strange, perplexing errand by a malign 
god. They have about them a vague pres- 
age of the ultimate destiny of the soul, 
which seeks in each movement, however 
trivial, the secret of that last unification, 
that ultimate redemption within itself of 
all distances, the final reclamation of all 
horizons — and the meaning thereof. 



THE COMIC VIEW 

THE comic is Dissonance viewed from 
the Imperturbable. Life is a con- 
tretemps. Life is an encounter be- 
tween I Would and Thou Shalt Not. Life 
is Mind out for a lark. Life is what you 
will, but the hiatus between what you will 
and what you do not get is the great motive 
for the humorous in art, literature and the 
magazines. 

Spencer says laughter is caused by a "de- 
scending incongruity." In plain English, 
a "descending incongruity" is an un- 
expected tumble. Man describing a para- 
bola as he slips up on the banana peel of 
Chance is the cause of that inextinguish- 
able laughter that reverberates from Olym- 
pus to Broadway. 

George Meredith tells us that the comic 
is the laughter of the Reason. And reason, 
he might have added, is the laughter of the 
Emotions. 

The smile is the scintillant light that 

(82) 



THE COMIC VIEW 83 

sparkles on the tear. The comic is the 
tragic viewed from the wings. Humor 
is the tabasco sauce that gives life a flavor. 
It is mirth that keeps us sane. 

The tragic is ridiculous because it has no 
sense of proportion. The Tragic View 
measures man against man. The Comic 
View measures man against the universe. 
One records the collisions of personality. 
The other records the impact of the mis- 
chievous molecule against the irrevocable. 

The Tragic View is defective because 
it takes itself seriously and bombards etern- 
ity with its whimperings. The Comic View 
is perfect because it takes nothing seriously, 
chucks the menacing to devouring Time, 
and impales the Inevitable on a smile. 

The Comic View is exhilarating. It 
mounts the barricades of limitation with a 
hop-skip-and-a-jump. It knows the value 
of all things. Science? Mere mumblings 
in a vacuum. Life? A parenthetical affir- 
mative between two negatives. Honor? A 
bauble for idealists. Love? Vascular ex- 
citation. Morality? A clever device of the 
first impostor — the State. Tra-la! 

Hoop-la! Hold up your paper hoops, 
Master of Ceremonies, and see Merry- 



B4 THE COMIC VIEW 

andrew dive through them and slit them 
into shreds. 

The Comic View is the cosmic view. The 
world of time and chance is meaningless. 
The Demiurge, the world-creator, is the 
Browning of celestial mechanics: style 
without ideas. The world is chaos drama- 
tized. The earth is the Farnese torso among 
the scuptured planets. Life is a problem 
in contingencies. Nothing eventuates. Ac- 
tions are webbed nothings spun by a Syn- 
copated Spider. Time is a loafer playing 
at tenpins. And whether you drink, or 
sleep, or make wry faces at Demigorgon, 
or shy spitballs at Fate — it is all the same. 
You dissolve at last in fine smut. 

So get the Cosmic-Comic View before 
you slough off and snuff out. Peep at 
yourself en passant. Look at your mean- 
ingless gyrations and silly circumvolutions 
from a perspective. Stop your sulking and 
come up to Pike's Peak. Sitting recumbent 
in your stews, you taint the air. Your 
disappointments are bacterial. You litter 
the things that devour you. Your sighs 
are miasmatic. Your liver has got in your 
eye and your heart in your boots. Get 
flush with the Spirit that abides. 



THE COMIC VIEW 85 

The raucous guffaw of Rabelais rever- 
berates to this day. The silvery rill of 
Cervantes — who dragged Prometheus from 
his rock and set him tilting at windmills — 
is Spain's immortal contribution to the 
Comic View. The dry smile of Moliere 
lingers on French letters. The metallic 
chuckle of Mephisto — I believe it was his 
chuckle that saved Faust! And even the 
sardonic grin of Aristophanes is as broad 
today as it was when it first split his face. 

These are the wondrous mirrors that 
image the human contretemps and flash back 
our calamitous comicalities. Here man- 
kind is skewered on the poignant wit of 
genius. Could we read Balzac at a single 
sitting the best of us would forever re- 
nounce life. How grotesque are our days! 
How aimless our actions! How petty our 
passions! The "Comedie Humaine" is a 
picture of a huge animal chasing its tail. 

Louis Lambert mistook the cataleptic 
trance for the Kingdom of Heaven! Pere 
Goriot gave up all for love and died of 
starvation! Old Grandet desired gold and 
wallowed in it; his daughter Eugenie de- 
sired love and died a pallid virgin. And 
yet Lowell says, "God may be had for the 



86 THE COMIC VIEW 

asking!" Balzac knew better: It is the 
gods who may be had for the asking. 

Man darts out of negation and begins 
to scratch the ground like a chicken out 
of the egg. With what care he builds the 
house of life! With what seriousness and 
pride he goes about his daily tasks ! He 
begins each day at exactly the same place 
he began the day before. But being serious, 
he lacks omniscience. He builds as though 
it were for eternity, as though Death — the 
joker in the stacked pack — did not lie in 
wait for him. His house is suspended in 
air, and for every brick he puts on the edi- 
fice a brick at the bottom drops silently 
into space. He is a mechanical figure mov- 
ing on a grooved stage between the right 
wing of Despair and the left wing of Ennui. 
His spiritual tympanum has been destroyed 
in the great Boiler Factory, Else he would 
renounce and smile. 

To reach the comic height you traverse 
the Valley of the Shadow. The Country 
of the White Lights is reached only through 
the Land of Ultra- Violet Despairs. You 
first wander through the pits of implacable 
negations and beneath sickly, pitted suns, 
and keep tryst with Succubus. 



THE COMIC VIEW _87 

The pinnacle of the ludicrous is attained 
only after having won all sorts of nasty 
opinions of yourself. The little peeping 
double on high is evolved in travail. In 
early life our theories of personality are 
geocentric and our social universe is Ptole- 
maic. On our dear tear-mildewed souls we 
mirror the earth and the fatness thereof. 
Everything revolves around us. The Self 
is garbed as Hamlet. What eyes behold us ! 
How our every action is recorded! We 
manufacture utterly absurd moral systems 
that we imagine others think we ought to 
live up to. We shed oceans of tears be- 
cause ourself doesn't like ourself. The very 
stars we believe to be spy-glasses pointed 
straight at our mewling and puking souls. 
Oh, the agonies of the self-conscious — the 
parturition of self from self! Ego, like 
protozoon, multiplies by fission. Each new 
thought is born with the evil eye. 

But sudden on a day the black garb is 
doffed — we know not how. Tears cease to 
flow, and the sob ends in a squeak. We 
are aware of a synthesis, an amalgamation, 
a blending as of many waters. 

It is the miracle of perspective. What 
was all this pother about? Who is this 



88 THE COMIC VIEW 

blubberer? I turn aside, watch myself come 
and go, and now smile indulgently at my 
antics. Funny little fellow, you there — erst 
myself — with your labors and loves and 
mouthings! Hi, little fellow there, come 
amuse me; give me a jest or break a bottle 
with me; sing me a funny woe-begone 
serenade beneath Dolores' window; or let 
me see your funny little legs sprint to the 
tomb. Hey there, little mannikin that once 
I thought a giant Thor, what deviltry will 
you be up to tomorrow? 

There is a wail in the night. A babe is 
crying for the moon. The wail has ceased; 
the babe has cried itself to sleep. This is 
often called renunciation. But the Comic 
Self on high smiles. He knows. 



THE ARTIST 

THE artist! 
He garners the world in a dream, and 
lo ! the dream is more real than reality ; 
he touches the dead and they tremble back 
into life and are more vital than the merely 
galvanized beings that stare at you in the 
street; his brain is fecund of worlds, of real 
men and women, systems and great cosmic 
dramas. 

What you see, what you feel is not real; 
only feeling and seeing and understanding 
are the immortal realities. The mind in- 
corporates the world, and what the artist 
gives forth is Chaos transfigured, turmoil 
stilled in its frenzies, the old foolish ges- 
tures called action transfixed on an Idea. 
The difference between art and life is 
the difference between reality and a mir- 
ror — art being the reality, life the mirror. 
Art is the reality because it is the exact 
record of what we feel and know, of what 
we aspire to be, of the ideal — hence real — 

(89) 



90 THE ARTIST 



self -enactment. Life is only a faint reflec- 
tion of our desires, and so the poet, the 
painter, the dreamer as men are ghosts, 
mere flesh-films; but their poems and their 
pictures and their abstractions are the 
highest reality. Our ideals and our in- 
stincts are our standards; and in a book, 
a poem, a picture, a statue, these ideals 
and instincts live to their fulness. 

Life wakes only our caricatures; art 
wakes the spiritual protagonist complete, 
substantial, sempiternal. 

Art takes life for its theme. Life has 
no theme. Practical life is aimless; it is 
the reel of a homeless, drunken man. It is 
detail, detail, detail, infinitely spread. Our 
acts are stop-gaps between moments of 
painful disillusion — mud-floundering at 
their best. The artistic spirit constructs 
ends; having attained them, it rests, a 
marbled, immortal contemplation. It dwells 
in an everlasting Now, and has the power 
to hallow smut and aureole the beast. 

My vision! Who can take that from me? 
My impassioned dream that burst my 
brain-dikes and overflowed on to canvas, 
that forced the marble block to yield its 
curved secrets, or that flashed on paper as 



THE ARTIST 91 



a rhapsody — that is the real moment, over 
against which the seething caldron of muti- 
lations we call the "great world" has only 
that validity for being that a fertilizer has. 

The particular seen as a particular has 
no meaning. No man can understand any- 
thing until he thinks abstractly. The differ- 
ence between the breed of slugs that move 
from point to point, from fact to fact, 
feeling their way like a snout along a dung- 
hill, and the godlike apprehension of the 
great creative artist is not a difference in 
degree but a difference in kind of brain- 
stuff. The mental difference between the 
Black Fellow and the anthropoid ape is 
not as great as the mental difference be- 
tween a plantation darky and Henry James. 

Life is mean and petty to most people 
because they lack the artistic instinct. They 
see John and James, and they are com- 
monplace. But read of John and James 
as Balzac saw them or a boor as Thomas 
Hardy saw him and the scales have fallen 
from your eyes. The finite has no longer 
any existence as such; the individual has 
ceased to be an individual: the man be- 
comes a type; an abstraction made flesh — 
or breathing flesh become an abstraction; 



92 THE ARTIST 



an insulated force; a concourse of ideas; 
an entombed universe. 

It is this exaltation of consciousness — 
this challenge to the commonplace, this war 
of the Idea on the tyranny of the senses 
that would cudgel the soul to an abject sub- 
servience — that constitutes the superiority 
of the art-instinct over the life-instinct. 
That which we touch too often is either 
destroyed by us or destroys us. The habit- 
ual kills wonder and familiarity slays awe. 
The Alps guide has no sense of the gran- 
deur and mystery which surround him; 
the astronomer sweeps the constellations 
nightly with his telescope and soon he 
dwindles to an automatic calculating ma- 
chine. And the crowds of the pavement 
have no eye for the sublime. Did not the 
sun and moon rise yesterday? And Venus 
in her brilliance is only "pretty." 

Walt Whitman one day crossed over to 
Brooklyn on a ferryboat. Years after he 
wrote a poem called "Crossing Brooklyn 
Ferry," and all who now read that poem 
want to cross the river and see the sky, the 
boat, the gulls, the deck-hands as Old Walt 
saw them. 

The great artist is a seer; he stands out- 



THE ARTIST 93 



side of the world. The human race fills 
in a perspective. The creative dreamer 
is sundered from environment — he is his 
own milieu — he is brain-light, detached cell- 
ecstasy. He beholds the endless procession 
into being from out of the womb of nonen- 
tity, and etherealizes God and diatom. The 
writhing, pain-gutted phantoms called men 
are the Epic of Evil, an epic of the artist's 
creation. He alone is likest God. 

Whether we writhe in the strait jacket 
of pain or are solved in the radiant monot- 
ony of a transcendent Perfection; whether 
we have flouted all the seductive but venge- 
ful sanctities in our effort to preserve the 
greater sanctity — self — whether we have 
challenged all the wooden deities of time 
and reviled the Arch-Bungler each day — 
these things which we have done or have 
not done are significant but seldom of 
practical importance. The creative intel- 
lect looks down upon himself and draws 
the essential facts out of its experiences 
and fashions them into images. 

The artistic temperament is the philo- 
sophic temperament, and good and evil and 
the codified cant called the moralities are 
the clay with which the creative dreamer 



94 THE ARTIST 



works; they have no other use. If a "sin" 
yield me truth or beauty it is no longer 
a sin. But this privilege belongs only to 
the strong. Weakness is the preroga- 
tive of power — only the strong man 
can afford to transgress. Before he falls he 
knows he will be up again. He never loses 
his strength. The great soul — the self- 
centered artistic temperament — thrives on 
his poisons, because to him they are not 
poisons. He would not always be with the 
Highest because his Highest alone is sure. 
The transgressions of the weak have no 
ideality in them. The weak, in reality, 
never transgress; they merely lapse. 

Nietzsche, Ibsen, D'Annunzio, Whitman! 
— four great storm petrels of the Inland 
Sea, workers in the Time-Mist, somber 
heralds of dawn— or night. Their dreams 
are sublime futilities, but dreams that 
swaddle us in an aura of godhood. Could 
the crowd grasp them, could the world 
enact in its drab, vulgar way the passion- 
glozed hallucinations that are blown from 
the skulls of these men, life would lose its 
flavor, ideal transgression its fascination, 
and evil and good their aesthetic value. 

Only ideal transgressions are worth 



THE ARTIST 95 



while; action is comic. What the gods wish 
to destroy they first make real. Were we 
all Hamlets, Iagos and Lears no one would 
read Shakespeare. 

Give us our immortal dreams, show us 
ourselves as we are not, give us the riot of 
our anarch minds ; foil us, foil, us, eternally 
foil us, that we may dream again! Let the 
scavengers scrape the gutters for coppers 
and duck in the mud for dimes. They are 
the "Captains of Industry" — the grimy, 
smutty captains of the marts and their 
"industry" a grimy, smutty, lurid hell. 

Philosophers are artists in ideas. They 
are the white heralds of the Great Release, 
eagles of the Infinite; they solve the iron 
thong of earthly limitations in a molten 
white idea, and walk not on terra firma. 
The creative philosopher seems in his 
highest flights to dam the eternal flux and 
in his widest generalizations to erase acci- 
dent. In Time under protest, he stands 
equipped for eternity, and his calamities 
are his foods. The abstract mind flows into 
the matrices of the concrete and changes 
the shape of the moulds. It hoods itself 
under all forms, but is none of these. It is 
that which perceives, but is never perceiv- 



96 THE ARTIST 



able. It sucks from a world of illusive ap- 
pearances the marrow of reality, and spits 
whole epochs of social movement upon the 
gleaming point of a generalization. The 
philosophic mind of the first order packs 
all of history, with its crescendos and de- 
crescendos of joy and woe, its evanishings 
and recrudescences, under a single scalp, 
and finds in the perversities, aspirations, 
meannesses and cruelties of a single soul 
the history of mankind in action. 

There lies in each soul a history of the 
universe ; indeed, the soul of each is nothing 
but embryo and cadaver — the new spring- 
ing from the old, life springing from death. 
Each impulse to action is a ghost seeking 
flesh again, some old dead ancestral self, 
scenting from its arterial prison-house its 
ancient loves. Within the recesses of your 
clay, mewed in brain-cell or aorta, there 
live Charlemagne, Christ, Peter the Hermit, 
Nero, Judas, St. Francis of Assisi and 
Shelley. Your temptations, your betrayals, 
your cruelties, your asceticisms, your 
penances, your will-to-power, your "cry for 
light," your lusts — that is history, and it 
needs not Gibbon in six ponderous tomes 
to tell me why Rome decayed. The poison 



THE ARTIST 97 



that killed Rome is in me, and the fate of 
America I can forecast in a study of my 
own strengths and weaknesses. The Law 
works everywhere. It is the one single 
reality. It is the immovable screen against 
which Time projects her endless shapes. 

The commonest objects have this in com- 
mon with the sublimest spectacles which 
nature or man offers: they are at bottom 
but phantoms of the brain, modes of 
cellular life. Children and geniuses bear 
on their faces a look of exalted wonder. 
That mingled expression of perplexity, 
awe, amazement on the face of a child when 
fingering a button on your coat differs only 
in degree from the feeling in the poet's soul 
when for the first time he sees Mont Blanc. 
The same feeling of wonder overcomes the 
philosopher when, step by step, he has 
tracked the variegated universe back to an 
impalpable, eternally persisting Force. A 
touch of the soul melts solids to fluids, and 
a flash of insight in the brain of man dis- 
covers to him the great cosmic cataracts — 
and we humans the perpetually evanescing 
debris on their surfaces. 

We are travelling toward the zenith of 
Self, and all great art is a report of the 



98 THE ARTIST 



progress made. Action is only valuable 
because it engenders reaction; because it 
shocks the brain to thought and moulds 
the soul to pictured moods which seek ex- 
pression. The shocks, the moods, the visions 
are real; the objects that caused them are 
brain data. 

The world is my dream, but I the 
Dreamer am everlastingly, else I could not 
say "It is a dream." 



UNDER A MASK 

THE right to live implies theft. If 
you cannot take, you cannot live. 
Seizing and assimilating to one's 
needs the things that lie about us are pri- 
mary notions. There is no law that sets a 
bound to any special manifestation of the 
law of acquisitiveness except another and 
opposing special manifestation of the same 
law. In organized society we pillage under 
prescribed conditions, plunder within limits ; 
what we call social justice is merely the 
machinery by which we regulate theft. 

The eternal combat waged between the 
House of Have and the House of Want — 
that is, between ability and inability — is the 
clash of gigantic forces which lie in the 
nature of things, so far as we know them. 
It is true, indeed, that the combatants 
drape their nakedness in all manner of 
gaudy apparel and that they fly beautiful 
home-made banners with little touch-and-go 
ethical mottoes; but these romantic trap- 

(99) 



100 UNDER A MASK 

pings please the stay-at-homes mostly — the 
drowsy Utopians, with their ideals of lazi- 
ness which they, again, with that incurable 
idealizing instinct of theirs, nickname self- 
development. 

"All property is robbery" — that is the 
reason why we hold all property to be 
sacred. What I possess I have wrested 
from some weaker being by superior 
strength or craft or subterfuge, or under 
the patronage of some legal lie. The 
effort involved, this final appropriation of 
a thing after a life-and-death struggle in 
which all the life-forces are engaged — this 
is what gives value to property and 
apotheosizes it in our eyes. 

"All property is robbery' ' — -that is abso- 
lutely true, but to say that robbery is an 
evil is false. Who will probe the subtleties 
of theft in organized society? Who dare 
trace his smallest possession to its begin- 
nings? All the things we own are smeared 
with blood and tears, and our triumphal 
marches are over the skeletons of the lost. 
Each one takes what he must; each takes 
what he dares to take; he calls it the "self- 
preservative right," ignoring the implica- 
tions of the phrase. For the right to pre- 



UNDER A MASK 101 



serve one's self carries with it the right to 
slay and steal until the self be perfectly 
balanced with its own youthful dreams of 
well-being. 

In the last analysis, all law and custom 
exist to safeguard and benefit the individual, 
who is the race-unit, the ultimate appraiser 
of all values. There is no such thing as 
"the common good," for there is no good 
common to all. "Perpetuity of the race" 
is inconceivable unless the well-being of the 
individual is conserved. Thus we have the 
paradox: Government, in the name of the 
"common good," destroying the units of 
which it is composed. Society is an ab- 
straction that has got itself organized. It 
"safeguards" the rights of the individuals 
by taking away his rights and makes him 
"upright" by clamping him in a strait- 
jacket. Like most romantics, the State is 
totally devoid of humor. 

Who bound me to follow "social ends"? 
Where did I precontract to labor and sweat 
for the "common good"? — to offend my- 
self by feeding it with ill-smelling phrases 
when it sickens for a life that lives, a voy- 
age against the stars, or into hell if so I 
please ? 



102 UNDER A MASK 

The ideal of good citizenship is the philo- 
sophy of servants. They pass and repass 
before themselves — the herd; they pass and 
repass before their heaven-created State 
like a fop before his mirror — admiring, 
smirking, titillating themselves with their 
own magnified image. Their slogan is 
Progress and their problem: How may we 
become smaller? Of growth they know 
nothing — growth, which is to pass beyond 
yourself, you the individual, you the iso- 
lated one. Leave the flock, outlaw yourself, 
you will be original and immoral; for all 
originality is "immoral. " 

The weak panoply themselves in codes 
and systems. It is their slowly evolved 
organ of defense against the strong — a spe- 
cies of vengeance, urged of course in the 
name of justice. How may I survive? 
asks the weak man. Organize the State 
and plunder the strong, whispers his con- 
science. All popular uprisings are attempts 
to impose upon the strong the very yoke 
which the weak are trying to cast off — the 
yoke of slavery. The slogan is always 
"justice"; the secret intent is revenge; the 
result is triumphant incapacity. The strong 
man's justice is always justice — that is, 



UNDER A MASK 103 

three parts of the cloak for himself and the 
remaining part for the beggar. The weak 
man's justice is only equality — a phrase 
that corresponds to nothing but the letters 
that compose it. 

Communities — cities, countries — what 
signify all these various forms of herding — 
this formal amalgamation of Custom's 
slaves — against extraordinary states of 
consciousness in a few chosen individuals? 
'Till the seer and the prophet and teller of 
news comes, accoutred in rebel garb, life 
has no significance. Life is merely the irk 
of a long sombre day, a crouching in a dingy 
corner of the universe listening with bated 
breath to the long-reiterant menace of 
death, a parley with the unseen, eyeless ills 
crouching bellywise by our sides — 'till the 
challenger comes, he who augments Fate 
with a larger destiny — and goes to his 
Calvary. Out of the commonplace rises the 
interpreter of the commonplace; forth from 
organized government comes the unorgan- 
ized rebel. 

The outlawed being may offend aesthet- 
ically, but he cannot offend morally; what 
he does may not be beautiful, but it cannot 
be wrong. He may bungle the scheme, be 



104 UNDER A MASK 

clumsy and awkward, build himself un- 
mathematically ; but if he is sincere he can- 
not be wrong; self- fulfilment is the only 
moral law. The thing that I must do is 
always right. Evil treads the same path as 
goodness, but it goes further; it is the un- 
curbed, the unleashed, the uncalculating, 
and, always dazzling the imaginations of 
men, is worshipped as power under various 
guises; it even taking the garb of humility. 
There are no bad men; there are only 
men who affect us badly; men who reject 
our way to felicity; who will have none of 
our blessed state. "Sweetness and light" 
are bitterness and darkness to a nature that 
finds delight in danger, war, depredation. 
Cain did boldly, in the full light of day, 
what Abel would probably have done from 
the thicket, for Abel was heaven's first 
sycophant; Cain, earth's first man who 
dared. Cain stood upon the dignity of his 
soul. Abel was the forerunner of those 
who perpetrated all the conceivable devil- 
tries which the mob-soul is heir to for the 
"glory of God" — a justification which to- 
day steals among us under a new mask, 
"the welfare of the race." The criminal — 
so called — preys upon Society in the name 



UNDER A MASK 105 

of his instincts; Society preys upon the 
criminal — so called — in the name of an ab- 
straction. The State, once anointed of 
heaven, has now become the anointed of 
man, and those who were formerly of God 
are now the lobbyists of the Summum 
Bonum. 

The strong man seeks out evil; the weak 
man is sought out by evil. The doctrine 
of evil for strength's sake, of rebellion for 
the soul's sake, is not for the domestic 
animal, nor yet for the jackal; nor may 
cripples become gymnasts nor kitten-eyes 
dart glances at the sun. At last, and al- 
ways, the mob must have its footpaths. 
Few there are who dare walk the shifting 
surfaces of the Milky Way; few are born 
to voyage against the North Star f 

Wreak your soul on Life. Use your 
powers. Never question whether they are 
moral. Once you put the question you are 
already weak. 

And 'ware the sly Delilah, Miss Morality, 
and her lupanar, the State, with its oils 
and balsams and mighty gelding-knife! 



A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 

PHILOSOPHY is the keyhole 
through which the curious may peep 
into the smithy of the Eternal, where 
the great iron laws are forged. 

The quest for truth is the human fond- 
ness for novelty — a highly specialized in- 
fantile trait. You must become as little 
children to set forth on these trackless 
mental wastes. Like children, you will be 
buffetted hither and thither by a million 
impulses. All things must be tried and 
tested — and cast away. To the mind of a 
child nothing has been proved, nothing dis- 
proved; all paths lie open. There is no 
evil; no good that has not the mark of hu- 
man expediency on it. To the seer and the 
child there are no dogears on the pages of 
Life's book; no one has been there before, 
and it matters not what is written on the 
page — read, and pass on. All things must 
be approached in innocence and with a 
naive fearlessness. It is literally true that 

(106) 



A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 107 

you must become as little children in order 
to see. 

I wish to see men, like Spinoza, as lines, 
planes, bodies and circles, and so study 
them. Still, while I wish to see them thus 
for purposes of passionless dissection, it 
must not be forgotten that men are not 
lines, planes, bodies and circles — that they 
are living masses of matter in pain, and 
that there is more logic in their blasphemies 
than in their prayers. 

The relation of man to the Great Neces- 
sity which is called God is not an ethical 
relation but is a geometrical one. There is 
no such thing as Providence; what we mis- 
take for such is cosmic economy. 

When the mind first perceives the illusory 
nature of the heart's greatest desire it is at 
that moment that the individual has taken 
his first step along the upper cosmic tracts. 
Once this glimpse is caught, there is no 
permanent back-going — there may be lapses 
to lower levels, a slipping back; but forever 
and ever the hyper-physical eye shall re- 
member that one glimpse it caught of the 
Infinite. 

It is at this moment that the larger lust 
begins. Earth life thenceforward will be a 



108 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 

kind of long sickness, with the salt savor 
of that endless sea forever stinging the 
nostrils of the mind, begging it hence and 
away. 

He who believes that good is the end of 
the universe, tolerate him; he who believes 
that evil is the end of the universe, respect 
him — but he who says that ends are myths, 
follow him! 

Looking from a very high building down 
on a great city one is powerfully impressed 
almost at the first look with the evident 
absurdity of life. One receives exactly the 
same impression as he ascends in intelli- 
gence, The eye and the mind are here in 
startling agreement. 

Progress defined for the highest mind is 
a motion away from the centres of motion, 
an accretion of insight. The active being 
flows toward his objects; the contemplative 
being has objects flow to him. 

All the waves of Time can be held at 
peace in the lap of the mind, all delusions 
can be held in the pupil of the eye, and the 
mouth of pain can be twisted into a smile. 
Against the infinite screen of Self the 
world-shadows come and go, and the fire- 
flies of knowledge emit their light and fall 



A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 109 



dead forever, and Chance undulates in 
countless waves, or swirls and spouts, bear- 
ing peoples and nations to the crest and 
silently dropping them into the hollows 
of Oblivion. Against the screen of Self 
is all this pictured, and each one may see 
it, for each is that Self. 

If the objects of the so-called material 
universe are nothing but states of conscious- 
ness, then there is no one particular state 
of consciousness that has a greater validity 
than any other state of consciousness. If 
the mind is merely an interpretative organ — 
a way of rendering things, a manner in 
which the individual reduces an aspect of 
the Great Mystery to some degree of ra- 
tionality — and if minds differ not only in 
degree but in kind, then Reality is an indi- 
vidual problem, and my universe is not your 
universe, my Reality not your Reality. 

There are as many laws as there are sepa- 
rate existences. Huxley tells us about 
chalk, Plotinus about the Infinite, Sweden- 
borg about angels. Can it be said that 
Huxley's interpretation of the images in 
his mind produced by an utterably unknown 
object in his hand is an interpretation that 
comes closer to some central Reality than 



110 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 

the interpretation of the images in the mind 
of Swedenborg produced by some peculiar- 
ity of his organism? If the angels were an 
hallucination, why not the chalk? If Ploti- 
nus was the dupe of his images when he be- 
lieved that twice in his lif etime he had united 
with the Infinite, so is every being the dupe 
of his images when he unites himself with 
the finite. 

We are no more "rational' ' than is nec- 
essary for our continuance. 

Those states of consciousness which come 
from a diseased brain, and which we call 
insanity, are valid for the insane. Grotesque, 
fantastic, irrational they may be; but no 
less grotesque, fantastic, irrational, imbe- 
cile are the actions of all who dwell in the 
finite to the eye of the Yogi, the eman- 
cipated mind. 

Delusion and aimlessness are the ear- 
marks of insanity; delusion and aimlessness 
are the earmarks of planetary life. One 
need but look from a height. 

Pleasure consists in the passing from a 
lower perfection to a higher perfection — 
that is, from a less complete realization of 
Self to a more complete realization of Self. 
Its condition is the instinct to eternal rebel- 



A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 111 

lion, an undying tendency to negative all 
seeming finalities. 

The mind lives in the Eternal in the 
degree that it puts aside intent, aim, object. 
They who shoot at targets never see the 
heavens. Inveterate swimmers are at last 
lost in the element they sport with. All in- 
tention is proscription and smells of death. 

To the contemplative mind one hour is 
the measure of the life and death of a 
million suns — one day the hour-glass of all 
eternity. 

The cosmic mind can have no evil 
thoughts; the vilest things can be pictured 
there and smiled at, as sunlight may lie 
over a brackish, slimy pool and will none 
the less be spotless light, or, again, as vile 
pictures can be shown on a white screen and 
leave the whiteness untarnished. 

To understand a thing thoroughly for- 
ever puts that thing beyond the pale of 
hatred; to love a thing merely is to sub- 
ject oneself to the possibility of hating 
that thing. Hence, understanding is the 
highest thing in the world because it in- 
cludes hate. The emancipated reason of 
man is the Holy Innocent. 

The illusion of good and bad : in the per- 



112 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 

formance of a "good" action the mind is 
focused on the effect that it voluntarily de- 
sires to bring about, heedless of the law that 
each act begets a multitude of other acts 
which have no relation in morals to the pri- 
mal intention. 

Pain is wrought by the intrusion of a 
personal desire, opinion, or prejudice in 
the presence of an inexorable law. 

Misery, in the last analysis, is neither 
social, political nor racial; it is caused by 
the inability of the individual mind to dis- 
criminate between what is its good and 
what is its not-good. Social evils, so-called, 
are merely the lumping together of the 
many ignorances of many minds. Where 
all are blind all must fall into the ditch. 
He who can discriminate goes free. 

The higher the intelligence the finer the 
powers of discrimination, the more things 
you will reject; the more things you reject 
the freer you will become. All social 
"remedies" direct us how to get more, not 
how to be more, how to become more. The 
rich dominate the poor; as a remedy the 
poor purpose to dominate the rich. Where- 
in lies the difference? The hawk watches the 
chicken and the chicken watches the worm. 



. A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 113 

That is, in brief, the game of society. 
Unless you abide in Self you are evil. 

Evil is always becoming good; good is 
always becoming evil. Change is readjust- 
ment ; and what we mean by eternal change 
is eternal readjustment. Hence progress 
is an illusion. For progress presupposes 
a constant net gain in an eternal process. 
Which is the same thing as saying that 
if we pour a peck of peas into another peck 
measure we have two pecks of peas. 

The intellect cannot sin; what is called 
conscience is a wordy war in the blood — a 
strictly pathologic symptom; the brain 
listens to the dispute, and the "still small 
voice" is born. But the brain may smile 
and smile and forever be a villain. All 
things are permitted it. 

All future events are decided — the intel- 
lect merely reveals the manner of the in- 
tention. Each tomorrow is already past, 
and related to eternity you have already 
died; related to Time, you still live. 

The thoughts in the brain are nothing 
but the bodily appetites in another form. 

All human development tends to the 
generation and perpetuation of error, for 
the more complex man's activities become 



114 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 

the greater the number of illusions it re- 
quires to stimulate his diverse activities. If 
man in his growing complexity were get- 
ting nearer and nearer to some great eter- 
nal, unifying truth, his activities would de- 
crease as he neared the goal and human 
life would be characterized by a greater and 
greater simplicity. 

The brain is the flower of organic life, 
and our thoughts the petals on the flower. 
The shedding of these petals, the ceaseless 
dropping, fading, of our thoughts reveal 
finally the worm in the bud — the nothing- 
ness of man and the futility of desire. 

Emotion is the elemental cosmic fire; in- 
tellect the cleansing, soothing waters. 

Herbert Spencer tells us that we cannot 
get beyond states of mind; thus we can 
never know the Reality of which mind is 
a mode of expression. In positing this 
Reality he had denied the possibility of 
apprehending it — a contradiction. There 
is a Consciousness that is not a state of 
mind; it is something immediately given — 
and in rare moments we know we are that 
Consciousness. Its presence is not appre- 
hended as a state of mind; it cannot be 
thought about — indeed, it vanishes the mo- 



A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 115 

ment we think about it — that is, the moment 
we have a "state of mind" about it. 

In these moments we know that all our 
states of mind — personality itself — are 
merely a lower activity of that Super-Con- 
sciousness. It is not known through thought, 
but thought is known through it. It is 
felt as a Presence when there is the least 
conscious thought in the mind. It is known, 
apprehended, with a degree of certainty to 
which a transitory state of mind can never 
attain. It comes as a supreme Awareness, 
abolishes by absorbing Object and Sub- 
ject, Time and Space. It is the datum of 
which states of mind are mere infinite data. 

Flee wheresoever we may we cannot es- 
cape the Centre. The universe is composed 
of infinite centres; circumference and diam- 
eters are illusions. Endless space is end- 
less centre. All evolution is a movement 
from centre to centre, because any point 
bounded on all sides by the Infinite must 
be a centre. 'The centre of immensities, the 
conflux of eternities" — there is nothing 
conceivable that is not always there — and 
There is always Here, for other than Here 
there is naught. 

The highest kind of action is meditation. 



116 A MEMORABLE ESCAPE 

Memory may cease, identity may lapse, 
consciousness may blow out, but Life can- 
not end. 



THE MASQUERADE 

THE belief in an external universe is 
the superstition of the senses. Of hear- 
ing, seeing, feeling and tasting have 
we woven these filaments of matter and 
garnished the immeasurable hollows of the 
cosmos with stucco and pilaster of seeming. 
The brain itself is only a dream of conscious 
force and this body of mine but a haunted 
house, itself forever withering and crumb- 
ling under the strain of its mutabilities. 

The Ego, turning everlastingly on its 
pivots of inexorable activities, whelps its 
eerie spectres which the whimpering thirst 
for the familiar in man kneads to a provi- 
sional hard-and-fast universe. 

Change is avid of her spawn, and the 
slime of circumstance breeds the brilliant 
bubbles which we are, only to suck us back 
into the swart of the grave, which is the 
womb of newer bubbles. 

I move, I talk, I gesture between the 
thing named zenith and the thing named 

(117) 



118 THE MASQUERADE 

nadir, but who shall tell me what I move 
toward when eternity and infinity stretch 
before and behind me? I speak, but who 
shall put a value on my speech when the 
ambushed forerunning Minute shall blend 
my voice into the spirit of a million gales 
and split my words into their infinite sound- 
particles? I gesture, but what do I hail 
when the phantom I hallooed had started 
out of the same hollow heart of things as 
my gesture? We stand upon a platform of 
shadows and hail the echoes of Appearance. 
We are the dials that mark no time; we 
are clocks with our circumferences every- 
where and our pivots nowhere. Out on the 
crag of our supremest imaging there is 
nothing but — imagining! 

See that headless, trunkless, footless, 
brainless spirit of man with its one tentacle 
of desire sprung like a hair from off the im- 
mobile, unstirred surface of the pre-crea- 
tional protoplasm — that hair-like tentacle 
feeling its way from the cellars of the Un- 
create up into the life-possibility, coming 
out of its swoon of a trillion cycles in 
nullebiety, bulging into — aye, fathering — 
this phantasmal universe of the "hypocritic 
days." 



THE MASQUERADE 119 

See how it wove that fantastic cycle of 
law which we call evolution, but which is 
only the ghostly tape-measure in the hands 
of we Wraiths of Desire. Evolution is 
only the method by which matter changes 
from protoplasm to putridity and the 
method by which mind ascends from imita- 
tion to extinction. 

There lie cancelled in the sepulchres of 
the brain-cells and blood-cells of man more 
ingenious universes than all accumulated 
Mind can imagine; worlds the strange en- 
ginery of which would turn mankind into 
gibbering idiots if they ever caught a 
glimpse of them through some freak of the 
subconscious, ghost-fabricating spirit that is 
the soul of us. The ghosts of the antique 
worlds that are socketed down there in 
Time's soundless voids ! When they walk we 
shall have a glimpse — if we retain our 
reasons — of the absurdity of this latest 
makeshift of the imagination in which we 
live. 

So these cosmic trial-rooms have come 
and gone, and we and they are the million 
anatomical experiments of the Thing. 

Moonless, starless universes there have 
been, and stones with brains, and men and 



120 THE MASQUERADE 

women who grew from trees, and lank, 
gigantic, formless beings who strode from 
abyss to abyss, and furry imps with twelve 
senses, and things innominable in universes 
that fructified and waned and shrunk into 
huddled corpses and are no more. Or, they 
live as faint reminiscence in backworld 
dreaming souls, little wrinkled memories in 
the byplaces of the subconscious, the half- 
erased memorabilia of the Almighty 
Mockery. 

This colored ooze of matter which flows 
along Time's lubricious sluiceways — this 
colored ooze of matter which is our universe, 
think you it is any the less absurd than 
those foundered in incalculable past cycles? 
Cause and effect give you proof of rational- 
ity, you say; but what is the cause of cause 
and effect and the effect of cause and 
effect? Where is your ultimate? Under the 
cowl of Imagination there is the set face 
of Fear! You are a phantom no less than 
the spectres that stood in the half -lit rooms 
of your brain last night when you "slept" — 
the sleep of a dreaming. 

That brooding vapor which we name 
thought sends off these glaring rings of 
matter which noose us the better to the mud 



THE MASQUERADE 121 

and quicksands. The beds of rivers, the 
bases of mountains, the roots of trees are 
of the imaged vapor that projects its shapes 
against the white screen of consciousness. 
Upstarts from our own tombs, we etch in 
the ghastly spaces that confront us suns 
and moons and the constellations of shining 
pebbles — and rub them out again. 

The fangs of Change fasten on all sub- 
stances and all things that are born have 
as sole dower a windingsheet. We are each 
and all of us separate urns filled with il- 
lusory flame that licks up shadows and that 
inter at last only silence. 

We are Time's ail and Motion's malady. 

To grasp and hold and possess a thing 
is the marriage of mockeries, the coition of 
shadows. Man is the wastrel of the inutile, 
ageless cycles. Call forth from the earth 
all that have gone therein and the earth 
would turn charnel-house, the very trees 
pale into ashy corpses and the waters swim 
with depth on depth of phantom faces and 
the Himalayas gray to multiplied skull- 
towers. 

Such are we in these kilns of chance and 
change and illusion. 

Little lanterns and bell-buoys — nothing 



122 THE MASQUERADE 

more are our senses ; lanterns and bell buoys 
that guide the phantom Ego for a little 
while across a phantom, mirage-studded 
waste. Performance is the gallows-tree of 
Intention, and action is strangled in the 
hempen folds of insight. 

Persons, things, historical incidents are 
the poetics of Change, the scenic properties 
in a play that is neither a tragedy nor a 
comedy. Rich in its buffoonery, it ap- 
proaches the farcical or the pantomimic — a 
pantomime played in a darkened auditorium 
with a mortal coldness blowing out of the 
wings. 

The spirit that rules life is neither a spirit 
of destruction nor a spirit of creation; it is 
the Spirit of Evanescence, a lapsing of 
shadow into shadow, a fusing and inter- 
changing, with a perpetual tendency to ex- 
tinction, for each thing tends to return to 
its metaphysical condition. All things are 
momentary, even Eternity, which is but a 
flitting thought across the blank surfaces 
of the Ego, unseizable, unstable; all that 
can possibly be is implicated in the transi- 
tory, confederate to Oblivion. 

Pass the whole universe of sense-contact 
through the spectrum of the Ego's interior 



THE MASQUERADE 123 

vision and one has colors and vibrations 
only. Here Euclid and Grimm are of equal 
importance and they that built the Pyramids 
built things as vain and less beautiful than 
they who lie under the Aurelian wall. 



RESPECTABILITY 

NO word cows like Respectability. 
We constantly hear those phrases: 
"The respectable elements of the 
community," "the respectable citizens," "re- 
spectable people." And we pass dumbly, 
hat in hand as though we had entered a 
fane dedicated to some high purpose, when 
as a matter of fact we are cringing before 
a paradise of cowards, the cardboard gate 
of which is painted to look like iron. 

On the waxed and shining ramparts of 
Respectability struts Conformity dressed 
like a flunkey. Behind him shambles the 
lackey Hypocrisy muffled in gold-leaf. 
From behind the walls, from deep within 
this Eden of parasites, is blown a sickening 
odor. It comes from the live beings im- 
prisoned within whose souls are without 
drainage. 

The dominant instinct in "respectable 
circles" is fear. The psychology of respect- 
ability is, thread for thread, link for link, 

(124) 



RESPECTABILITY 125 

the psychology of cowardice. Long genera- 
tions of "respectable families" have stu- 
pidity flickering from the eyes and bilious 
abjectness a-flutter on the cheek. 

Respectability is a survival of the herd- 
ing instinct of the lower animals. The 
plane of initiative, which is distinctively 
human, has not been attained. In the great 
droves of the respectable — a strange mix- 
ture of bovine and fox-like instincts — dif- 
ferentiation has not yet begun. The law 
of variation does not apply here. And this 
is because in these vast herds there are no 
individuals; there is only type. It is true 
that they are called by different names, but 
this no more signifies individuality than the 
branding of numbers on oxen signifies 
differences of intelligence. 

The evolution of respectability would of 
course have to include the evolution of mo- 
tion and its ramifications from the first 
Colorless Conformity, wherein Nothing 
was; detailing the metaphysical history of 
the first rebellious tremblings in that massed 
vacuum — the first spurts of color, the first 
sinful hankerings, the first defiance of 
immobility of the original sinful atoms. 

Some such idea as this, I take it, runs 



126 RESPECTABILITY 

through the legend of Prometheus, who 
rebelled against the deadly-dull philistinism 
of the gods and who flung the glove — or, 
rather the fennel-rod of fire-anointed 
thought — in the face of Olympian respect- 
ability, with its Sorosis, ennuis and porch 
gossip, and who was punished by having 
his vitals nibbled for all eternity by the 
croaking ravens of the Olympian Status 
Quo. 

Again we find it in another form in the 
war between the hosts of the Lord and 
Lucifer, whose quick mind, tinged with the 
healthy Byronism of that pre-Byronic age, 
conceived that memorable insurrection 
against the cataleptic respectability of 
Heaven. 

Still, again, the legend reappears in 
Genesis, where the serpent, brain-full of 
knowledge and wisdom, stuck his fangs 
deep into the Arcadian respectability of 
Eden, shattering not only the complacency 
of Adam and Eve but preparing the way 
for Cain, whose heel, stuck deep into the 
sacrificial offerings of his smugly dutiful 
brother, flattened the nose of respectability 
and gave to history in himself its first Man. 

In the sphere of zoology we are on firmer 



RESPECTABILITY 127 

ground. In the long run, mammals of the 
same species are militantly bourgeois. They 
think in droves and instinctively fend them- 
selves against the incursions of the New. 
There are no doubt renegade whales and 
baboons with ideas of individualized des- 
tinies and deers that overstep the calcined 
codes of mob-action and who have analyzed 
the meaning of the mincing step, the boot- 
leg glance and the homely fireside virtues 
of their companions ; but there is always the 
restraint of a depleted larder and a ruffled 
skin and Opinion with its condemnations 
to divers hells. Variation from the type 
is never respectable. A reasonable resilience 
is often granted, but, in the long run, it is 
fatal not to do as others do. Whinny in 
herd-rhythm, snarl to the note of the drove, 
let your lowing be according to your sta- 
tion — something like this we conceive may 
be the rules of the sub-human protagonists 
of the "respectable elements" of society. 
And life is jigged in herd-time and the soul 
of the sub-human species lies in its lucent 
pickle. 

So sub-human respectability streams into 
the human, passing over by narrow ways 
and mule-trails. As we know them here 



128 RESPECTABILITY 

they are the sons of God and Home is 
God's acre. They worship at the godhead 
of Authority, "things said," the embalmed 
historic lies. They stand solidly arrayed 
against variation from the mass, as do their 
four-footed betters. They all have the 
courage of rejecting their own convictions. 
They sit rigid in their moral tarpaulins. 
They make daily pilgrimages to their own 
souls, spotless nullities. The Kabala is in 
Philadelphia. The Sacred Stone is a nugget. 
Pretence is the first virtue among them. 
If they post to forbidden sheets, it is done 
on some moral hypothesis. 

This giant silent conspiracy of mediocrity, 
this race-thesaurus of the average, has in 
all ages been the sworn enemy of all men- 
tal and moral progress. Respectability is 
the leaden weight in the scale of conserv- 
atism. It crucified Christ and egged Byron 
out of England. It excommunicated Spi- 
noza and hurried with the fagots that 
burned Bruno. It invents anti-vice societies 
to shelter its mind against its own porno- 
graphic instincts. In all history Respect- 
ability has never given the world a brave 
act, a brave thought, a beautiful idea. Food 
and sex — they are the axes on which it 



RESPECTABILITY 129 



turns; for it life is only significant below 
the navel. 

It is impossible to compute the number 
of beings that have been chloroformed in 
the House of Respectability. Bribed, 
beaten, threatened, the spark of moral or 
mental revolt has gone out of thousands 
of young minds and they have lived in 
those fetid purlieus and died with a chaplet 
of the ordained virtues on their brows, 
pews paid up to date, the coffin neatly be- 
flowered. 

At birth handed iron lances to fling at 
the sun, they came to cut them up into 
darning needles and book-cutters. Found- 
lings of ideas pregnant with dreams, they 
were farmed out to Rote, their dreams pal- 
ing to ashy fears. Their hands outstretched 
toward the open-seas of life, they have felt 
in their muscles the palsy of will-lessness 
before the croaking cries of the landlubbers 
of Respectability. The fine purple coat of 
rebellion becomes a seedy house- jacket and 
the sandals of fire are exchanged for car- 
pet-slippers that convey one noiselessly over 
the plush conventions. All who enter there 
have abandoned themselves. 

The temples of Respectability are the 



130 RESPECTABILITY 

abattoirs of the quick and the catacombs 
of the virile. 

Respectability is always dragged behind 
the Spirit of Age. It is the inveterate 
enemy of the innovative spirit. Philistia 
ends where ideas begin. What seems to 
be growth is really change of environment. 
Respectability is the same in all ages. They 
are the same people who drove Mary Mag- 
dalen into the gutter as those who held up 
their exquisitely manicured fingertips in 
horror at Richard Strauss' "Salome." Re- 
spectability refused to accept the Coperni- 
can theory of the universe until it was 
hinted that not to do so would stamp it as 
unconventional. It refused to accept Ibsen 
as a great seer and poet until it found out 
that the seventh-rate literary umpires had 
swallowed him. 

Nevertheless, the Viking spirit in litera- 
ture, art and life should bless Respectabil- 
ity. It is the citadel against whose walls 
strong men may try their strength. It is 
a brazen hollow image, against whose pas- 
sionless face warriors may practice their 
skill at lance-throwing. It is a proving- 
ground for those who go forth. 



THE IMPENITENT 

TO have the courage of one's trans- 
gressions — that is heroic. To repent 
of one's transgressions — that is mere- 
ly virtue. All apology contains an element 
of baseness. To whom should we abase 
ourselves? All men are guilty of the same 
meannesses— and he to whom I bring propi- 
tiatory gifts will give them to some one 
whom he has offended. It is the penny that 
ever returns. No man ever asked to be 
forgiven a wrong whose knees did not 
quake. This joint-sag is the atavistic ten- 
dency to beg for mercy on the knees, a prim- 
itive obeisance to Strength, the "Peccavi!" 
of the lost. 

The arch-impenitent awes us by his as- 
sumption of power; in his fine disdains we 
catch gleams of the elemental, the barbaric. 
His is the confidence of the predestined; 
the aloofness and soul-sufficiency that rely 
on Fate, whose will will be done. He is of 
the open spaces. Conscience, with its sick- 

(131) 



132 THE IMPENITENT 

room airs, has not yet alchemized the Pro- 
methean fires in his soul to the poisonous 
drool wherewith the terror-hounded forever 
water the rank flowers of the past. He who 
is without conscience is without weakness — 
for conscience is the past trying to live 
twice, the frost that chills the seeds of god- 
hood in us, the back-water that we hold to 
scour our souls when life is at low-tide. 
A poet of transcendent overdreams has re- 
corded the fact that "Conscience does make 
cowards of us all" — and he gave us Hamlet 
from his hot, subtle brain to prove it. 

To trace the evolution of conscience — of 
that pathologic still, small voice which man- 
kind declares tells it when it is doing wrong 
— would be to write the history of mankind's 
defeated dreams. Anything that man can 
accomplish is right. By a trick of thought, 
goaded by some stern, masked necessity, he 
makes it so. What he has failed in he decrees 
"wrong." The race is eternally adjusting 
itself to its own weaknesses, which it styles 
its virtues. The individual soul is a hell of 
lost lusts whose ghosts forever trouble us 
with their claims. We seldom stop to ask 
whether they have real rights, whether the 
fetor of their breath on our pale, anemic 



THE IMPENITENT 133 

souls is not the poison that our later selves 
have breathed into these wondrous, ancient 
beasts, whom we have denied in our fear, 
but who lie deep-buried in the sands of our 
souls, mumbling and drowsing and calcu- 
lating like the Sphinx. 

There is a living soul behind that hand 
which in the shadow of the gibbet firmly 
waves aside the rose-water consolations of 
the priest. The gesture has the sombre 
majesty of the Inexorable. Murderer he 
may be ten times over — a murderer, like an 
adultress, is a legal fiction — still he will not 
sully his soul with that last, greatest in- 
firmity — the cry of the human to the Eter- 
nal to reverse the iron order and sponge 
from time what time was bade do. We 
may hurl at the malefactor who is sullen 
defiance to the last our fatuous anathemas 
with the wonderful syntax, but in secret 
we revere his grim amiability in the face of 
the Irrevocable. An inflexible necessity 
hounds him to the end. He who builded 
the house, let Him look to it. The tenant 
must take what he finds. And if we for- 
give him — that is the crowning puerility of 
mediocrity. For at bottom "I forgive thee" 
means "I no longer fear thee." We never 



134 THE IMPENITENT 

forgive those who have it still in their power 
to harm us. And the patronizing forgive- 
ness of Eternal Omnipotence, the pat on 
the head, to have the dust smilingly flecked 
from your coat by the finger of Omni- 
science — what great soul will submit to that? 

Hope is a masked blasphemy — and re- 
pentance is the mask turned inside out. The 
self swells to huge proportions beneath the 
introspective eye. The ego, reeling drunk 
on its own private lusts — intoxicated by 
its very thirst — makes of its desires an end- 
less tape-measure, which it unreels from the 
cradle to the pit; and even upon the brink 
of the clay-walled hole, with lean and flesh- 
poor fingers, it tries to measure some 
phantom, brain-born Beyond. We will 
have no destiny but our own, no wide- 
circling fate-full laws that have not pro- 
vided for us, no wind that does not blow 
our bark to some haven mapped out in the 
chaotic foreworld for the special delectation 
and eternal safe-housing of that gilded 
granule — the fadeless and indestructible 
Me! 

There is not enough natural faith in the 
world. There is nothing we have doubted 
more than the fundamental verities. All 



THE IMPENITENT 135 

believe that two and two make four until 
it comes time to die; then we ask God to 
make two and two five — or, please God, 
four-and-a-half; and we twist and turn and 
try to blarney Him down to four-and-a- 
quarter — "just this once, God." This spe- 
cies of God-baiting is called repentance. 
Few have the courage to believe their evil 
deeds were predestined, were the outcome 
of an endless past, the sewage of great 
world-currents. "I am I," cried Magda, 
the impenitent and regal — and that fine 
challenge was answered by "Come up 
Higher, thou!" 

Each trivial act is dissolved in a govern- 
ing law, and all law is noosed in a remote 
necessity. Each impulse is compounded 
of many impulses, and our faintest thought 
trails back to the sun. The very disbelief 
in a necessity for all our acts and thoughts 
is a matter of necessity. There is a tem- 
perament that would deny the fatality of 
temperament. The author of Job gave us 
a peep into the star-chamber where our in- 
dividual destinies are decided. And Goethe, 
who himself smiled from his citadel set on 
the other side of good and evil, made Faust 
the victim of a conspiracy. 



136 THE IMPENITENT 

The philosopher of impenitence was the 
great Spinoza — Spinoza the remorseless and 
the daring. He was the master immoralist 
— or non-moralist — and from his spiritual 
loins sprang the great psychologist, the 
ferret-brained Nietzsche. God created time 
and Spinoza destroyed it. For him the 
past did not exist — his serene soul moved 
from Now to Now. Booted and sandaled, 
a Knight of the Open Road, he went forth 
in youth to do battle with the most profit- 
able lie ever concocted — the lie of free-will — 
a priestly invention to absolve the Most 
High. 

Spinoza's God we can pass over. It was 
nothing but a formula for ennui — an omni- 
potent, omnipresent, indestructible stupid- 
ity. It had no knowledge of good or evil, 
but abided in a transcendental state of 
total ignorance. It was a sort of spiritual 
glue that held all things together. 

The days of this lens-grinder were white- 
capped negations. From the other side of 
life he watched humans playing and dis- 
sected their emotions. He conceived the 
emotions to be a sort of poisonous coil, a 
tangle that held man in the mud. For the 
tear-besotted sentimentality that is forever 



THE IMPENITENT 137 

looking back upon an arid past he had that 
profound contempt which philosophers 
have masked under a brain-smile. 

Good and evil are relative terms and 
mean nothing to him whose vision extends 
beyond the immediate effect of each act. 
There is no code that lasts a thousand years. 
There is necessity, which is to say no man 
can escape himself. His most unlawful 
acts are lawful, and in nature there are no 
such things as transgressions. Or, rather, 
there is nothing else — all is transgression. 
Government is an organized transgression. 
Its excuse for being is that it can carry on 
the cosmic system of vengeance better than 
the individual can. 

Spinoza was the most cold-blooded anarch 
who ever lived and certainly the boldest 
moral — or immoral — philosopher. He 
crawled out to the eaves of things, peeped 
over, and boldly took the leap. He burned 
all bridges, cut all bonds, wiped all yester- 
days from his mental slate, asked for no 
philosophic quarter and gave none. 

What is evil? he asked. Evil is that which 
gives man pain. Not only pain that comes 
from external things, but pain that comes 
from ourselves is evil. Conscience is evil 



138 THE IMPENITENT 

because it is the soul preying on itself. It 
is a Torquemada invented by sickly souls 
who still dwell in the mists of the emotional 
foreworld. 

Come with me into the beyond-world of 
the intellect, of the understanding, and see 
yourself and your comic sins as my placid, 
immovable, passion-dry God sees you! cried 
Spinoza. 

"Repentance is not a virtue, nor does it 
arise from reason; but he who repents of 
an action is doubly wretched and infirm," 
he says calmly in a celebrated proposition. 
The original transgression has inflicted pain 
on someone; but the act was motived not 
in you but in the endless past that stretched 
away before your birth and was latent in 
the sidereal gases. What can your repent- 
ance do but add pain to pain, tear to tear, 
anguish to anguish? All the waters of 
Araby will not wash your damned spots out, 
because the waters of Araby cannot inun- 
date the infinite; and your weaknesses, 
which you call your sins, were predestined 
in unremembered past durations. 

The doctrine of human responsibility is 
one that has its uses. Historically, society 
is an evolving illusion, and it feeds on lies 



THE IMPENITENT 139 



like the daughter of Rappacini lived and 
thrived on poisons. But there is a finer 
virtue than self-condemnation — it is self- 
absolution. Penitence is an hysterical 
tickle-self. It is like one of those scorching, 
belly-burning dishes that degenerate Rome 
concocted to stimulate a jaded palate and 
a blase maw. "Confession is good for the 
soul/' it is said — that is, it is pleasurable, 
and we invent sins for the pleasure of con- 
fession and repentance. Like dead flies in 
a bowl of curdled cream, so lies the soul 
of man in his tear-vats. The lives of men 
are an endless expiation, as Emerson, a 
crowned god of the O^erworld, has said. 
The souls of the repentant are great penal 
colonies — their days a series of vicarious 
atonements. 

Each day we should be apostate to a self 
is the essence of the teaching of Spinoza. 
The progressive evolution of the individual 
soul is like the uncoiling of an infinite chain, 
each link of which differs from the other. 
Some links are dun-colored, some are slime- 
corroded, some are of gleaming gold, some 
of neutral tints, and some fleece-white. The 
slime-smeared link cannot dominate the free 
soul. It was forged in hell; let hell look to 
its works! 



140 THE IMPENITENT 

There are two orders of beings; they 
whom their devils use and they who 
use their devils. Spinoza was Orestes 
triumphant. 

Goethe was a spiritual Titan who strode 
through his own soul and reached an outer- 
most gate where he signaled back a "Come 
hither and see!" to the sickly age in which 
he lived. Goethe saw life from so high a 
point that his rejection of life and his ac- 
ceptance of life were the same thing. He 
stood where all things merged and com- 
prehended in a glance the meaninglessness 
of any one thing and yet the necessity which 
urged all things to disappear in one another. 
"Sin," "evil," "pain" were to him fine ex- 
periences which no great soul should shrink 
from; rather should pain be courted for 
the residuum of wisdom that lies at the 
bottom of it. Does the physician who has 
inoculated himself with deadly germs for 
the purpose of furthering an intellectual 
lust regret his action if the experiment has 
yielded him a truth, even though looking 
on that truth has condemned him to death? 
So in the spiritual sphere Goethe would 
urge us to live our sins half-gayly for the 
knowledge they bring, and never to look 



THE IMPENITENT 141 



back lest we turn to pillars of jelly. 

Let him who is perfect and stupid repent, 
for he has not yet lived; but he who has 
been bludgeoned and has bludgeoned in 
turn; who has been taken and given in the 
combats where each instinct fights for its 
own; who has made of his own life a 
shambles and yet peered at himself from 
time to time from the little white turret 
in the brain-apex — let him rejoice and 
repent not. The fox is caught in the gin 
and the star is enmeshed in law and the 
souls of men are matrixed in their destinies. 
The lithe-limbed Goethe swam through the 
flotsam and jetsam of his acts and brushed 
the slime-matted seaweed from his eyes — 
swam to a point where the waters meet the 
stars and escaped with Spinoza into the un- 
arithmetical spaces. 

How fast our sickly pasts would decom- 
pose and vanish in their poisonous mists did 
we not forever keep them alive with our in- 
verted glances! We lie on the crest of an 
on-moving wave, but instead of taking our 
bearings from an everlasting height — the 
immovable present moment — we glance 
down with tear-stained cheeks into the 
hollow we believe we just rose from, or 



142 THE IMPENITENT 

stand wringing our hands in fear of the 
hollow we believe we are about to disappear 
in. 

What is the outcome of our acts? Our 
most damnable lies may breed in time's 
mighty tangle unforgettable virtues. And 
if one could trace back those actions which 
make him complacent he would find them 
rooted in degradation that would bring the 
inerasable pallors to his soul. 

The religion of Buddha is founded on 
the profoundest cosmic vision that ever il- 
lumined a human mind. The world is an 
expedient, and nothing is or is not but 
thinking makes it so. In the view of the 
Buddhist, repentance is as idle as rejoicing, 
for both spring from the illusion of self — 
that transitory agglomeration of millions 
of individuals which science calls cells. All 
are in the whirl of law; the individual is 
bound to a fiery, whirling wheel that one 
moment ducks him in mud and the next 
moment whirls him to azure vistas. You 
are the mud, the azure, the wheel, and the 
fiery whirl; you are all but yourself. So 
the Buddhist, negativing past, present, top, 
bottom, good, evil, here, hereafter, folds his 
toga about him and lies down to pleasant 
Nirvanas. 



THE IMPENITENT 143 

Self -consciousness may destroy or create. 
The first peep into ourselves terrifies us, 
and if we do not succumb to what we see 
in that glance into the inferno out of which 
we have wriggled we shall live to spurn it, 
or better, utilize it. Your soul will in time 
become a fine drama — a playhouse with 
one silent auditor. You will love your 
"sins" for the sake of the climaxes that 
their triumph or defeat leads up to. You 
will become your own hero, your own 
ideal of perfect villainy; and when you 
grow tired of the performance you can 
enter, through the medium of art, into the 
marvellous adventures of other men's souls, 
for all lofty minds at last dramatize or sing 
themselves in some form. Emerson's essays 
are the chronicle of his spiritual escapades, 
Ibsen's plays are his jungle-story, Chopin 
set himself to music, and Balzac explored 
himself and made of truth a gorgeous fic- 
tion. 

St. Augustine, who was so black that he 
turned white, and who, like Tolstoi, mistook 
impotency for self-mastery, says that we 
may rise on our dead selves to higher things. 
Rather may we rise on our live selves to 
higher things. The past is dead only in 



144 THE IMPENITENT 

the sense that it never existed. Walt 
Whitman sang of himself in his entirety — 
"denying nothing." He was always just 
ahead of himself. Nature, he saw, had no 
penitential days; she was ruthless and 
blithe, possessed something of a naive cun- 
ning, used compost and lily-pollen in her 
laboratories, made poems of her rain-days 
and fair days — and nothing was ever amiss. 
Both Emerson and Whitman recognized 
evil, but refused to admit the idea of sin 
into their conception of things. They lived, 
like Spinoza and Goethe, in the overspaces 
and were never troubled by that form of 
spiritual dyspepsia which comes from over- 
eating at the tables of the past. 

Friedrich Nietzsche saw in conscience 
the greatest evil that the brooding mind of 
man had ever raised up. The great rhap- 
sodical psychologist, who flung down in 
passionate hate the gage of battle to the 
other-world roisterers, saw to the bottom 
of that pit of slime, the soul of man. Those 
who had lusted and failed of their lusts 
had spawned conscience, which begat guilt, 
which begat sin, which begat emaciation, 
penitence and heaven-hunger, which begat 
another world, where the strong men cease 



THE IMPENITENT 145 



from taking and the eunuchs get the best. 
The weak, the tear-stained, the neurotic, 
the diseased build and build, and into their 
earth-palaces they enter not, so they have 
conspired to overthrow the palaces that 
have been erected by their masters, the 
strong, the unrelenting, the never-regret- 
ting, the impenitents. And they have made 
of their weaknesses virtues and put craft 
and cunning into the seat of power and 
made idols of pillars of salt. The vengeful 
eyes of the lost flash from behind their 
masks of love, and the knotted veins of 
cruelty are concealed by a crown of thorns. 
There is no motive power in regrets — 
that way lies death — or, worse, the jealous 
rage that begets him who loves his fellow- 
man too much and himself not at all. Self- 
love is the condition of all love: the bud 
must flower before it can seed; the sun 
is the sun to its last outpost of flame. The 
impenitent is himself to his last act; he 
presages a new series, where evolution and 
devolution are one; where there is neither 
growth nor decay, but an eternal transition, 
a rising from equilibrium to equilibrium, 
from infinite sweep to infinite sweep. 



THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 

THE mystery of surfaces, the delight 
of touch, the joy bred of the mel- 
odies of motion, the ecstasy of con- 
tact with ideas that germinate newer per- 
spectives and that pullulate with reminis- 
cences that wear over their faces the purple 
veils of fantasy, mutilated memorabilia of 
ante-natal experiences — and all these things 
unallied to any idea of responsibility, mun- 
dane or super -mundane ; just life for life's 
sake; the adventure of the mind in matter; 
the adventure of the senses in air and water 
and sunlight and rain; to sack the minutes 
of their possibilities; to privateer against 
the day of death; to skirt the coasts of 
strange lands built of those moods that arise 
in the brain just before waking time; 
plagiarizing no rules and making none; 
foraging on all men's thoughts; smuggling 
through the cellars of the sub-conscious the 
gold and silver of daily experience, to be 
wrought to unfamiliar shapes in those dark- 

(146) 



THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 147 

ened smithies; to gut life, to maraud on the 
farthest borders of the conceivable, and to 
stand accoutred at the tomb with the loot 
of all this world prepared for another ap- 
prenticeship in consciousness: Such is the 
passionate purpose of the pagan. 

The miraculous does not happen; the 
miraculous is. The pagan attitude is the 
attitude of wonder, amazement, childish 
delight. Matter is haunted. Winter is 
haunted with the ghost of a spring. With- 
ered branches with the ice glittering upon 
them hold latent within them the perfumed 
rose. The atom is a tiny house with many 
ghosts. Sunlight on my shoe is inexpli- 
cable. Aye, this sunlight is haunted — else 
how came this world? All science is classi- 
fied folklore. Government by pixies is not 
one jot inferior to government by earth- 
quake, fire, famine and evolving sidereal 
extinction. 

So the pagan stands swathed in the sense 
of elemental mystery, translating all things 
back to their private, original glamour, and 
with the witchcraft of his holy innocence — 
which contains much of the riant diablerie 
of adolescence — unwinding the cords of 
complexity that man has wound round and 



148 THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 

round the omnipotent Ghost that permeates 
all things. 

By the mechanism of association of ideas 
we generally ally the word paganism with 
the words Ancient Greece. But that ad- 
mirable flowering of the human spirit, those 
few centuries wherein Mind and Matter 
played the unrepentant prodigal with their 
own native inheritances, was no isolated 
phenomenon. Paganism is the instinct for 
liberty. It is a tendency, not a bundle of 
opinions. 

A pagan movement is always a "new 
movement." It is always a rebellion against 
dogma, codes, conventions, systems; it is 
the deep procreant spirit that wages war 
against all forms of stupidity. It is the im- 
mortal red bud that miraculously, age after 
age, in literature, art and thought, bursts 
through the leaden strata of custom; the 
sword whetted with light that cuts the 
thongs of familiarity that are twisted round 
and round the living, palpitant soul of man. 

There is always a renaissance somewhere 
in the world. The human spirit will not 
long be set in limits. It will suffer, but 
it will not rest. The pagan spirit comes 
to stir the dead, to blast the sight with its 



THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 149 



supernal vistas or to twist us to frenetic 
maenads with its sudden inundation of 
Beauty. It may be the sudden epiphany 
of a Nietzsche in philosophy, a murderous 
force that burns up everything in its trail, 
including itself, after having set in flames 
the rotting ramparts of the orthodox gods. 

Or it may be the quiet intrusion in life 
of a Walter Pater, who wove with the 
golden thread of antique dreams that great 
arras curtain that holds in the irrevocable 
quiescence of its web the stories of the 
spiritual wayfaring of Marius, Denis 
L'Auxerrois, Sebastian Van Storck and 
Florian Deleal ; — Pater who was the renais- 
sance of the Renaissance. 

Or it may be the unannounced recurrence 
of a Pierre Louys, whose "Songs of Bilitis" 
conjugate the things seen with the eye and 
the things touched of the body in all their 
moods, tenses and inflections. With the 
language of babes he transfigures and re- 
juvenates a staled world. The wonder of 
trees, of lakes, of human nudity, of the 
simplest emotions assaults us like a reproach 
after turning these pages. The bellied, 
sun-flecked sail of the ship that lurches 
high-low in Mitylene waters, the singing of 



150 THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 

rain-drops on the surfaces of pools set in a 
sombre woods, the music of lovers' steps 
as they walk to the tryst — simple, immortal 
things, with not a trace of moral millinery 
about them nor the rouged smirk of guilt. 

William Sharpe was of those who pro- 
claimed the Golden Year. In "Vistas" there 
is a Pere Hilarion who forsakes his cowl 
and girdle at the call of love, and, ripping 
the Crucified from the Cross that stands 
on the shore of the waters that divide Yea- 
land from Nay-land, he flings it angrily 
into the current and plunges to the other 
shore — Yea-land — with the woman he loves. 
They vanish in the dawn. The same motive 
recurs in "Cathal of the Woods." A young 
priest is buried alive in a tree for breaking 
his vows. He loved a King's daughter. 
But from the tree the soul of Cathal 
prophesies the doom of the preachers of the 
new faith, the disciples of the White God 
of Galilee. Of the priest who decreed his 
tree-death Cathal sings: — 

"Flame burn him in heart of flame, and 
may he wane as wax at the furnace, 

And his soul drown in tears, and his body 
be a nothingness upon the sands." 

Cathal becomes a tree-man and finds his 



THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 151 

sweetheart, a tree-woman, and they become 
as immortal as Nature, spurning the 
ephemeral Gods of nations and their sapless 
priests. 

And through the familiar labyrinths of 
life it is thus that some human revenant of 
the usurped gods always comes to pour his 
libations of joy, to jettison his fulness, to 
spill into the golden matrices of art this 
Hyperborean postlude. 

If the erotic Sappho was a pagan, so 
was the austere Epicurus. In our day Renan 
and Anatole France, Goethe and Keats, 
Swinburne and D'Annunzio were pagans. 
Rabelais and Montaigne left records that 
smug gentility has not yet found the means 
of annulling. The spirit of scepticism is 
essentially pagan. Dogma and morals orb 
in the same beaten track. Both are pa- 
rochial. There is a chance that man, evolv- 
ing toward superterrestrial spheres, may 
stumble across the skirts of Truth some 
day; but he can never do it in the company 
of Dogma or Morals. 

Paganism, on its intellectual side, is the 
spirit of receptivity. It feels all things and 
Knows nothing, smiles and fingers with a 
pitying touch the shuttle of Destiny 



152 THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 

which weaves such calamitous issues. 

For what one thinks signifies little; but 
the manner in which one thinks reveals 
one's affinities. Individuality does not lie 
in our thought, but the way we characterize 
thought. There are no new messages for 
the world; there are only new messengers 
from old principalities; new eyes that re- 
read the old parchments. The manner in 
which one feels a thought, that consecrates 
him. 

Paganism is attitude. 

The psychical root of paganism is feel- 
ing. Its test-tubes are pleasure and pain. 
Its metaphysic is the eternality of the pres- 
ent moment. Life is its own excuse and 
pleasurable feelings — mental and physical — 
are the anthemings of the glad gods on the 
keyboard of nerves. Religion is fatigue. 
To be "saved" for another world is to be 
"lost" to this — the adventurer grown tired, 
Siegfried hesitating before the rampart of 
flame, Prometheus recanting, Man the Vik- 
ing on the seas of sound, color and menac- 
ing wave turned parish beadle. 

And the "ethic" of the pagan impulse? 
It is this: Squander yourself on the winds, 
but be not blindly blown along with them. 



THE ETERNAL RENAISSANCE 153 

Be the heart of the blast. Absolute sub- 
mission to life is absolute mastery of life. 

The emptiness of that word "progress"! 
All life, the evolutionary process, tends to 
dissonance, complexity. Differentiation in 
itself is estrangement from the common 
World-Root; and as we go to seek the 
Great Harmony it recedes before us. Circle 
emerges from circle, and the last circle is 
only the last illusive horizon. Each single 
thing holds the sought secret, but we spurn 
it. Science sees only in it a link in a chain. 
Each minute is only part of an hour, the 
disciples of method and system will tell us, 
when in reality the hour is the essence, the 
very heart of the minute. Pluck the minute 
in its entirety, and the secret of the hour — 
of all hours — is yours. 

The pagan spirit can never die. It is it- 
self the instinct to live, it is the eternal 
knocker at the door of the House of Cir- 
cumstance, the Voice that calls in all cen- 
turies to the pursuit of Beauty. It is the 
spirit of revolt in art and thought. It is the 
cloven flame that consumes age after age 
the citadels of authority and their comman- 
ders sheathed cap-a-pie in their ethical 
petticoats. 



SILENCE 

THEY who are won to silence have 
passed the gaudy gates of Vanity 
Fair — the gates that open outward 
to the Purple Hills of Dreams. They have 
famished 'mid plenty and roistered with 
sick heart, and the noises they brewed and 
the beautiful dreams they spilled on the 
dusty highways and the soft lies their eyes 
have told are no more. For them the reign 
of the Real has begun. In silence they 
hear — and their souls are the noiseless foot- 
falls of the Eternal. 

Caked in those whispering south winds, 
burnished by those eternal suns that warm 
without scorching, swaddled in those white 
wrappings, gulfed thus in the immur- 
murous — they are the supreme critics of 
life. Before the tribunals of taciturnity the 
strident is rapped to order, and the gilded 
gabbler of the portico is sentenced to wear 
the motley and caper with fishwomen. 
With shout and laughter we garnish the 

(154) 



SILENCE 155 

days; but Sorrow comes with finger lifted 
to her puckered lip, and we are silent; or 
if we cry aloud it is where no one can hear. 

Each action contains the germ of a des- 
tiny; each action is a distinct individual in 
embryo; and if we had a finer spiritual 
organ we should find in these great silences 
of the soul destinies and embryos and veiled 
Fates in myriad procession. The best of 
us, as we are, immured in our limitations, 
deafened by bodily hearing and blinded by 
bodily eyesight, can hear them, sometimes, 
scratching their messages on the walls of 
our being as they pass by. 

I see a huge crowd pacing the boulevards 
at midnight. Fanfare, pell-mell, cackle — 
eyes that rove from point to point in anxious 
quest of Pleasure; fruitless pacings to and 
fro, inutile phrases whispered to gold-sodden, 
paunchy disciples of "sociability" by papier 
mache women — each soul in reality yawn- 
ing at each other. I see also a narrow 
room on the top floor of a house shrouded 
in silence. A youth holds Shelley's poems 
in his hand. "Swiftly walk over the western 
wave, Spirit of Night" — he has begun that 
exquisite invocation written by the Boy of 
Spezia Bay. With half-closed eyes he 



156 SILENCE 



treads with Shelley the western wave and 
is afloat in the Spirit of Night, and he has 
heard more than all the mottled mobs of 
the boulevard, for he listens, while the mobs 
can only hear. 

To be mewed in marmoreal silences, to 
fall with sated visage and cloyed tongue 
and a self, hewn to a million diversities, 
upon this downy bed canopied and cur- 
tained with gauzes and textures of strange 
patterns; to hear the uproar, tragic in its 
inutility, inutile in its tragedy, dwindle to 
a world-buzz, then cease entirely — that is 
to feel the rapture of calm, the ecstasy of 
conscious surcease, a passionate peace. 

There are an awe, a wonder, a sheen of 
the ethereal in all fine silences. We here 
breathe upon the adamantine — and the 
adamantine is not; we give ourselves to 
float upon a far-winding stream tinct with 
ancient sunlights — a bubble drifting upon 
a greater bubble, blown from pipes greater 
than Pan's. On these stilled waters we 
may be immersed without fear of drowning. 
It is immersion without submersion, reality 
without illusion — and we are hidden, yet 
seen of all. 

Hamlet's silences are the most impressive 



SILENCE 157 



parts of the play; in his soliloquies we rec- 
ognize the soul of the troubled Dane. The 
Fates that lure him to the catastrophe 
evolve their deviltries in silence. The secret 
of the tragedy is spoken by no mouth; it 
is a Presence unseen, unheard, but not un- 
felt by that inner nerve that responds to 
the Idea in which the muddied action of 
the play is cradled. 

And with what subtle, silent motions do 
the Fates weave their filaments of adamant 
around the trusting Othello — damned by 
a fine virtue, undone by his own nature, 
discovered, routed and bludgeoned to earth 
by an ingrained optimistic faith in the good- 
ness of mankind! Iago is the fiend par 
excellence of dramatic literature. He is 
the quiet, grim architect of a most magni- 
ficent palace of pain. His sense of touch 
is exquisite. His building is a destroying. 
And yet in nothing that he says, in nothing 
that is heard, do we discover the depths 
of his extremest infamy. It is left to si- 
lence — to the imagination. It is Othello 
who goes out in utter spiritual darkness; 
and though Iago is gyved, he stands tri- 
umphant — and silent. In that silence of 
Iago in the bedroom of Desdemona the 



158 SILENCE 



Eumenides have paused to survey their 
work. Iago was only their instrument. 

In those deep recesses of our being where 
the ashes of our dreams lie inurned in their 
bronzed, time-worn receptacles; in those 
caverns of the undersoul, where our pro- 
jected but abrogated selves murmur against 
the decree that has sentenced them to those 
barren wombs; in all that past that is not, 
yet is everlastingly, we recognize something 
of the inarticulate, something that may not 
be uttered even by the heart to the brain. 

Ecstasy is mute. Shadows curl around 
"I Will," and acts are the undoing of 
dreams. "I Will Not" is bred of the higher 
view. If it is cold at the poles of ultimate 
negation, it is so only in spiritual prospect. 
When one has fought his way there he has 
cast his laprobes of illusions behind. The 
sense of opposites is lost. There is neither 
cold nor heat on those silent promontories ; 
there is placidity, the urgency to rest. The 
calm of a half -humorous disdain bathes us. 
The soul is then a rendezvous for shadows; 
the mind the Rialto of the dead. Postpone- 
ments are postponed— and it is on the con- 
dition of perpetual silence that Eternity 
has made her assignation with Time. 



SILENCE 159 



Thought laps us all about and we are 
hemmed in by dreams. Speech and act 
at best are but a stammering. Our confes- 
sions to each other are mere stutter. The 
finest revelations are made to ourselves. 
Who has never paid a pilgrimage unto him- 
self has never touched the Kabala. The 
Mecca of motion is Oblivion. 

Elate youth darts upon Life and with 
rough hand and strident voice seizes his 
tinselled trophies. He takes the universe 
for his 'scutcheon, and by the divine right 
of vascular palpitation he claims the circling 
worlds. Blatant youth! where dost thou 
run — or, rather, where runnest thou not? 
In mid-life his cries have withered to a 
whine and our Don Quixote has dwindled 
to a vinegary critic. His elder age is a 
discreet silence. 

Old age should hold its tongue. Like the 
walls of old houses, it has secrets to tell. 

There is no soul born to flesh-woof that 
has not on a day heard the drumbeat of 
retreat sounded in its ears. We have fought 
and wept, replied and defied, but in the 
Unconscious our genius is chiselling the 
Hour — that fateful hour that shall put 
clamps upon our affirmations and sew up 



160 SILENCE 



our lips with the golden threads of taci- 
turnity. Our scale of life-values has been 
wrong. The battles we have fought have 
only served to cloud our brains with the 
dust of combat. We see we have been 
trying to measure Eternity by minutes; 
thenceforth we shall eternize minutes. We 
smile — and take the veil. 

In silence there is universality. Lonely 
souls seek the solitudes of nature because 
it is there the dreams of spiritual liberty 
come true. In these fastnesses are creatures 
disburdened of trammels. Winged and 
crawling things empty their souls of im- 
pulse as they list. In the wilderness desire 
and attainment are one. The spirit soaked 
in these silences participates in the wild 
riot of life — riot without uproar; revels 
that are mum; endless muffled motion. The 
soul passes into all living things. The 
silent observer becomes the spirit of the 
place, and his meditations are spun into the 
crannies of shadows and the crevices of un- 
apprehended worlds. 

Here man regains his lost kingdom and 
sits proudly throned on Self. He feels 
himself at the very core of Being, flush 
with every conceivable future. He is 



SILENCE 161 



welded into a One. What has been is 
jettisoned; what is to come is unvisored. 
It is Nirvana without annihilation. The 
squirrel that darts up the tree carries a 
human soul with it, and the bird that flies 
overhead is chanting a finer song than it 
knows, for it warbles for two. The forest 
dreamer rides on the crest of a fiery cloud; 
and the slime on the tarn — that is he, too. 
The individual is blotted out, and the mys- 
tery of the One-in-Many — thenceforth it 
is no mystery. 

This is the only liberty man can ever 
attain, and the path lies through silence. 
Each must go his own way. There is a 
supreme release for each, but two cannot 
find it together. The unthwarted will, 
equilibration, quiescence, the suffusion of 
dateless days — would these be yours? Then 
rivet yourself to the silences, put your ear 
to the dark shell of Night, and fly the 
hubbub. 

Man is a phenomenal fragment, a tem- 
poral circumstance, a momentary coagula- 
tion of debris on the infinite stream of 
Being. His personality is dispersed in 
death and meditation. In the vast upper 
silences the infantile I of daily blab fades 



162 SILENCE 



like the shadow of a dream. The whole 
universe of things lies stretched before us 
like islets in an ocean. The radiating 
streams of Time flow back to their sources 
and drag with them the bubble ages. 

Like a Greek naked and sweaty from the 
games who plunges into a cooling stream, 
so we, sweaty and distraught, fresh from 
the satanic saturnalias of action, may 
plunge into the lustral calms, the healing 
silences — and forget. 



POSTERITY: THE NEW 
SUPERSTITION 

THE latest decoy set up by the inde- 
structible god of illusions is Poster- 
ity. Man has been invited to live for 
various motives. Once it was for the glory 
of God. Comte proposed as a motive the 
glory of man. Now we are invited to live 
for the glory of Posterity. Nietzsche called 
Posterity the Overman; socialists call it 
"the rising generation." 

No one has thought of the glory of liv- 
ing for the sake of living, of eating, fight- 
ing, reproducing merely because they give 
pleasure. Always there are devil-gods that 
call for sacrifices ; always there is the bogey- 
word that demands obeisance and tribute 
of all our actions. Nothing must be allowed 
to exist for itself. Each thing must exist 
for the sake of some other thing. The per- 
fume in a rose is only legitimate if there 
is a human nostril somewhere to be intox- 
icated; and the perfume of our acts and 

(163) 



164 POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 

thoughts is only a "moral" or a "right" 
perfume if it gives pleasure to the nostrils 
of God, Church, the Common Good, or 
Posterity. 

Man has not yet become a good animal. 
He suffers from ideals, as he once suffered 
from superstitions. An ideal is a super- 
stition in court clothes. It makes very little 
difference whether you believe that an east- 
wind blowing down the chimney on a moon- 
light night will bring you good luck or that 
an act that gives you pleasure in the doing 
is "right" if it benefits Posterity and wrong 
if it doesn't. 

The East worships its ancestors; the West 
worships Posterity. The East lies prone 
on its belly offering tributes to ghosts; 
the West bows its bead in adoration to the 
ghosts not yet born. When an Oriental 
worships the soul of a bit of wood we call 
him superstitious; when the Westerner 
worships certain letters of his alphabet 
which spell "God" or "Church" or "Moral- 
ity" or "Posterity" we call it the Ideal. 

And a smile steals over the brow of Puck 
and Momus reels in glee. 

Ancestor-worship is the old superstition; 
posterity-worship the new superstition. The 



POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 165 

old bottles are filled with the new wine, 
but the old labels have never been taken off. 
We still march under mottoes and tramp 
to Ultima Thule to the raging tom-toms 
beaten by priests and idealists. Still we 
signal a host of imaginary beings with the 
gaudily colored pocket-handkerchiefs of 
our latest trumpery abstraction. 

All these words that man bows before 
one after another in his flight across the 
face of Time are born of the idea of Re- 
sponsibility, that somewhere there is Some- 
thing that is taking cognizance of all his 
acts and will bring him to account for them. 
Sometimes it is the bearded, concrete 
Jehovah of the Jews; now it happens to be 
a beardless, visageless, vaguely shadowed 
Posterity. The idea of responsibility is as 
universal as all other illusions — the uni- 
versality of an idea or instinct merely proves 
its universality. From the feeling of re- 
sponsibility sprung the most immoral and 
strength-destroying doctrine that we know 
of — the doctrine of the Vicarious Atone- 
ment. 

Responsibility to God was the first great 
necessary lie — for if the race is to be pre- 
served (no one has ever found a rational 



166 POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 

reason why it should be) lies are more nec- 
essary to its growth and sustenance than 
truths. Responsibility to God — or gods — 
was the first ideal, the birth-boards that 
clamped and twisted the brain and soul of 
healthy self-centred beings and changed 
their centres of gravity from the enkernelled 
Self to an all-seeing, all-recording Nonentity 
that had a name but no local habitation. 

Man is born in his own incalculable ante- 
rior images, but he came to believe in his 
all-ignorance that he had been created in 
the image of another, a giant jail-warden 
who allowed him to rove the earth at his 
pleasure under a heavy bail-bond to keep 
the peace. The idea of an eternal responsi- 
bility to this abstraction germinated the 
first seeds of man's moral weakness, para- 
lyzed his activities, sickened him with 
scrupulosities and rilled him with the con- 
sciousness that healthy activity was sin. 
War began within him, a war between his 
superb irresponsible instincts and the idea 
of a vicarious responsibility, and out of 
that shambles issued the whining Christian, 
the lord of tatters called the Idealist, and 
that mincing prig, Conscience. 

The idea of responsibility to God began 



POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 167 

to wane with the dawning suspicion that 
man was not a celestial but a sociological 
animal. Conceiving himself to be this new 
thing, he now invented a new kind of re- 
sponsibility called "social responsibility." 
The old mask was being repainted. The 
phrase "social well-being" was hoisted into 
the Ark of the Covenant of Lies. An act 
was now good or bad as it affected the com- 
munity. Man loved his neighbor for the 
responsibilities he could shoulder on him; 
the corner ballot box was the Kabala; the 
community had power to bless or curse the 
individual. God had become a town-hall 
orator; the Recording-Angel had become 
a court-reporter. The era of the State-Lie 
had begun. 

The transition is easy from the cant about 
living for the sake of "doing good in the 
community" and "benefiting the whole" 
to the ideal of living for the sake of poster- 
ity. The old obscure doctrine of blood sacri- 
fice reappears in this new posterity super- 
stition, slightly attenuated and shorn of 
its immediate and more obvious savage 
characteristics ; but the old trail of responsi- 
bility and life-guilt is there. 

We are told to live for the sake of pos- 



168 POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 

terity, we must breed for posterity, eat for 
the sake of posterity, be moral for the sake 
of posterity, dress hygienically for the sake 
of posterity, and even die when necessary 
for the sake of posterity. We legislate for 
posterity, rear a child with an eye to pos- 
terity, tinker with the social system for the 
sake of posterity, tamper with individual 
liberty for the sake of posterity, construct 
Utopias for the sake of posterity, vote the 
socialist ticket for the sake of posterity. 

It is the fetich, the Moloch, the Golden 
Calf of our civilization. We who are liv- 
ing, palpitating in the flesh and blood pres- 
ent have no rights; the ego is not sufficient 
unto itself; we are only straws to show 
which way the sociological and evolutionary 
winds are blowing; we are only the bricks 
and mortar that shall go to build the mar- 
vellous, fantastic, phantasmal edifice to 
house that coming Holy Family — Posterity. 
Our deeds have no value unless thev feed 
the bulging belly of incalculable non-exist- 
ent tomorrows. We are only as scraps of 
bone and meat tossed to that fugitive glut- 
ton, the Future, by pasty-souled Idealists 
and the spineless altruists who poison life 
with their doctrines of responsibility and 



POSTERITY: THE NEW SUPERSTITION 169 

hoax the feminine with their metaphysical 
Cardiff Giants. 

We are to be systematized, badged, classed, 
grooved, wired, stuffed. Our instincts, our 
very marrow, are to be inoculated by the 
virus of altruism and our faces beatified 
with the forerunning rays of the great 
Posterity Light. How we are to glow with 
the shine of "right living" — all because the 
altruistic quacks with their obsessions of 
Succubse and Incubse have dreamed a new 
dream which they call Posterity! 

Weak, impotent, helpless before the im- 
movable present, man salves his sore spot 
with hopes for the future. Not being able 
to regulate his life today, he promises him- 
self a virtuous, vicarious tomorrow. Not 
daring to set up his Ego as God and its end- 
less pleasure as sufficient motive for all his 
acts, he sets up an Alter Ego and calls it 
Posterity, as he once called it God, then 
the State or the Community. 

With ecstatic eye and lolling, anticipatory 
tongue he awaits for his happiness in Pos- 
terity — something no one has ever seen, 
something no one can define, something 
that could not possibly exist. 



AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 

THERE are those who will look up 
at that great round clock without 
a circumference called the Universe 
with its two hands — Time and Space — of 
infinite length and pretend to tell you the 
exact time! 

The older we grow the less we know. As 
the years roll over us we become more dog- 
matic about the few things we do know, and 
it is this dogmatism that is mistaken for 
wisdom, just as a deep, matured voice is 
often mistaken for brains. 

The fruit of all knowledge is not know- 
ing, but doubt. If we will one single ac- 
tion long enough its contrary will be born. 
A truth will not bear prolonged study. 
First it begins to look ridiculous; then it 
disappears into something else. Knowledge 
seekers are wave-chasers. 

The believer is allowed his little illusion. 
He is a comic shape. He is set in limits, 
mortised in his mania, specialized, forever 

(170) 



AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 171 

mummified. God and the Devil both smile 
at him indulgently. But the unbeliever — 
the Seeker prowling across the Eternities, 
the Wanderer who rejects and passes on — 
is the tragic shape at which neither God 
nor the Devil laughs. They know that if 
in some unimaginably remote being-shape 
this unbeliever should happen on the thing 
he seeks both Valhalla and Nibelheim will 
crumble. The little comic shape prinked 
out in his cock-surety goes straight to 
heaven when he dies — and so ends. But the 
other lives in hell here and hereafter. And 
that's why the Twin Powers never smile. 
We know that the character of our 
dreams when asleep is wholly determined 
by certain subjective conditions — that they 
are frightful, beautiful, obscure as certain 
organs of the body are affected. In the same 
way the whole external universe — with its 
endless moving panorama of trees, stars, 
animals, our own bodies — is determined 
for us by subjective conditions. The uni- 
formity of nature is nothing but uniformity 
of brain-structure. The external world is 
a dream — more coherent, it is true, than the 
brain-pictures of the night — but the coher- 
ence is a matter of degree only, for the laws 



172 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 

of coherence are rooted in the mind. 

Could we stand at the core of things we 
should see no difference in kind between 
that vision of height, solidity and sublimity 
which when standing at its base at high 
noon we call Mont Blanc and the vision of 
Mont Blanc in sleep. We transfer to the 
senses what properly belongs in conscious- 
ness. The perfume of a flower is not in the 
olfactory nerves, but in the brain. Per- 
fume is a form of consciousness ; so are light 
and heat. The proof of this is in the fact 
that anaesthetics abolish for us the whole 
universe, while stimulants that fire the brain 
heighten our consciousness of it. Dreams 
are nothing but blood stimulation — brain- 
expansion — and the universe of motion and 
matter exists under the scalp. 

Thus to adjust ourselves properly to the 
amazing fugacity of things we must re- 
main sceptics. The intellect at least should 
be sceptic; emotion should build itself 
some great object of faith — even if it be 
but faith in the grandeur of the sceptical 
intellect. 

Opinion is Pride and Prejudice scrawling 
their justification on the walls of the brain. 

If you stare at a truth too long it will 



AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 173 

become an error. We should blink continu- 
ally. Truth is not a thing, but an aspect. 
You must catch it off guard by continually 
playing 'possum. 

Life evaporates when we attempt to seize 
it. What is the tangible if not a state of 
consciousness ? 

The survival of an idea — religious, philo- 
sophical, ethical — one that survives age 
after age through infinite changes and vicis- 
situdes, may prove that idea to be a uni- 
versal truth or may prove that the soil in 
which that idea has grown is incapable of 
improvement. Damp cellars will always 
produce fungus — and damp cellars are im- 
mortal things. What is fit survives ; what- 
ever serves is true; but fitness is antithetical 
to universality, and that which serves can 
never be the Absolute. So the longest 
surviving truth has nothing in common 
with the Truth. 

The sublime and the ridiculous adhere 
in the same object. They are mental states, 
points of view — not different things. The 
action that at twenty we thought sublime, 
at sixty, with deeper insight, has become 
ridiculous. An inhabitant of the moon 
could see nothing sublime in its aspect. To 



174 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 

sacrifice our life for another is ridiculous 
from nature's point of view, for nature 
knows nothing of individuals. "What differ- 
ence does anything make?" asks the cynic, 
thus turning all things into objects of ridi- 
cule. Still, the question is sublime! 

The desire to do good is the source of 
all the evil in the world. In attempting 
to better our condition we add to the com- 
plexity of things. Like a man caught in 
a soft bog, the more frantic his efforts to 
extricate himself the deeper he sinks. In 
the eye of nature a good impulse is merely 
so much force which, coming into contact 
with another force, may generate a third 
force that will cause more pain than the 
original "good" force sought to suppress. 

A pessimist is a man who sees life as it 
is. To present any aspect of life as it is in 
itself through the medium of art — that is, 
with the highest degree of impersonality 
that a mind still in the flesh can attain — 
is necessarily to have one's self stamped 
a pessimist. Hence, the disinterested seeker 
after truth is always the pessimist, the 
alarmist, the iconoclast. The optimist is 
never concerned with truth, or things in 
themselves — he is only concerned with the 



AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 175 

status quo and its preservation. He is a 
chubby soul with visions, or a lean soul 
who is a victim of monomania. An ele- 
mental truth is always a painful one be- 
cause the bases of the world are a hunger 
of some sort. 

Ibsen's stark souls who stand shivering 
in the rush of inexorable forces, Nietzsche's 
pitiless psychology, gnawing with ravenous 
tooth at the rotten timbers of civilization; 
Gorky's perfet incisions, De Maupassant's 
fine ironic gesture — all these strike terror 
to parochial souls. But to tell the truth 
about things is not necessarily to be a pes- 
simist. Every increment of power is an in- 
crement of life. To know the elemental 
truths and to stand calmly by the world's 
stink-pots, to watch with calm, unimpas- 
sioned eye and record with calm, unimpas- 
sioned pen or brush the workings of our 
futile passions react upon our souls and 
tonic us for battle. The man who looks 
under the lids of the world gains in mental 
ruggedness what he loses in color. 

For a man to see life as it really is he 
should spend a year in a madhouse, a year 
in a hospital, a year in a jail, and a year in a 
tomb. In the madhouse he will come to 



176 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 

understand practical life, in a hospital he 
will see the soul of man as it slowly turns 
and writhes on its bed of needles, in the jail 
he will come to comprehend the meaning of 
universal necessity and catch upon his ear 
the wail from the depths of things, in the 
tomb he will meet Change the Comedian. 

Then he will be prepared^ to think. 

Mankind are like flies that have settled 
on a giant Gymnast. His novel feats we 
call the miraculous; his habitual contor- 
tions we call Law. 

And then so glibly men speak of growth ! 
Endless growth is an eternal and simul- 
taneous advance of each desire toward every 
point of a circle that widens to infinity. 
That is the irony of all movement. 

Universal unhappiness is caused by the 
inability of infinite appetite to subsist on a 
finite number of crumbs. 

The life-happiness (or unhappiness) of 
the individual is a purely arithmetical prob- 
lem. Each one of us could work the problem 
out to his entire satisfaction — that is, if he 
knew the kind of multiplication table the 
Unknowable is using. 

There is a cold so intense that we come 
to believe it is warmth. There is a terror 



AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 177 

that numbs. Sharp pain, by causing us to 
swoon, abolishes pain. There are truths 
so great that if presented to us suddenly 
we instantly recognize them as delusions. 
There are such tragic possibilities in our 
each act that if pondered over long enough 
they will evoke a smile. Thus do all things 
pass into one other; opposites turn out to 
be aspects, and aspects the relations of x 
to x. 

Philosophical scepticism — Pyrrhonism — 
is the tendency of the mind to ubiquity. The 
finest minds are attracted to every point in 
the Circle — they are the arch-susceptibles. 
The greatest mind sees all things from all 
standpoints in one single act of intuition — 
it feels a propulsion from its every center 
to every conceivable other center. 

Why should I go ghost hunting, for who 
has explained man? Where is there a 
haunted house that can compare with this 
universe before me? 

Where are there rappings and creakings 
such as I hear around me here in this 
strange place of mind and matter — and 
earth and sea? Where are there more won- 
derful apparitions than these billions and 
billions of ghosts of flesh and force called 



178 AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 

men and women that have risen from this 
eternal, immeasurable Desire in things? 
What sudden translation and disappearance 
more unaccountable or monstrous than this 
lapse into death? This is the Haunted 
House of Life in which we move around, 
and each single being is but a wraith above 
his own grave. 

Sanity is the completest view of the com- 
pletest mind, an instantaneous vision of 
each thing from all possible sides. Com- 
plete sanity makes for the negative attitude 
toward life, just as the concentration of a 
mind on a single idea to the exclusion of 
all other ideas tends to narrowness, mono- 
mania, insanity. All positive men are pas- 
sionate men because they are not developed 
mentally. The Indian yogis, Pyrrho, Mon- 
taigne were the sanest of men. Beware 
of knowing only one thing and knowing it 
well. In its limits the rabbit is master of 
the thing it knows best. 

We speak about "the great crises of his- 
tory," which are purely imaginary crises. 
Time works her really great changes si- 
lently, is her own critic, and records nothing 
of importance. Sleep is crisis, waking is 
crisis; each turns on its own pivot, and the 



AN EVAPORATING UNIVERSE 179 

great things are no matter, and history is 
the chronicle of sleepwalkers. Only Illusion 
is eternal. 

Victory is always disastrous. It is the 
moment of disillusion. 

Nature is not a series of Laws. Nature 
is infinite readjustment. An eternal Law 
is only an adjustment that has lasted a 
long while. 

Irony is an acid pity, the despair of the 
brain, an iron mask that impotent tender- 
ness sometimes puts on to seem the bravo. 

Looking forward at twenty we say, "We 
are Destiny." Looking backward at sixty 
we say, "We have been Destiny's work." 
That illusion of twenty was the most im- 
portant part of her work. Destiny we may 
never know; but we may know her masks. 
As force she masks as Free-Will, as Evil 
she masks as Goodness. She is Necessity 
dominoed as Pride. 

To look on the trees and the sunlight a 
little while, to read a sage or two, to medi- 
tate and wonder at that which is forever 
vanishing, to sleep upon her breasts a night 
or two — then quietly to slip away, still 
young, still swollen with unbirthed desires: 
that is to taste life, that is to know all. 



THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 

THE human ego is an organ with a 
hundred pipes and one stop — Death. 
Life is Death's dream. Our nature 
is rooted in the Unconscious, and our life 
is but a little waking from that eternal 
swoon. The brain is never anything but 
the organ of dreams, and our body with 
its endless anatomical subdivisions is 
nothing but a huge tentacle of a Shadow. 

Do men come back from the tomb ? Aye, 
for the Unconscious is a tomb and all of 
us who breathe move and dream now — 
all who say they are — are merely reappear- 
ances, uneasy shapes moving across the 
blurred vision of the Great Syncopated 
God. 

The irony of life! the irony of death! 
For only the dead are satisfied, and they 
would not be satisfied if they were conscious 
of their satisfaction. In that midnight of 
silence they dream not, and never comes 
to them the bitter ecstasies. 

(180) 



THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 181 

The irony of birth! the birth of a child 
is the triumph of death. At the moment a 
new being comes into the world a grave 
somewhere stands empty. 

The day is a bitter almond; the night a 
vision of falsehoods — and the bitter truths 
of open-eyed sentiency and the fantastic 
jigging in the brain we call our dreams are 
alike fictions, solved and drowned all at 
last in that grotesque reality — Death. 

Indeed, has not Hegel said that to live is 
a kind of blasphemy? 

The one fact is Pain; all other facts are 
factors. The great central soul of things 
temporal is an unquenchable Pain, and the 
great central soul of things extra-temporal 
is a supreme indifference. Pain creates; in- 
difference absorbs. And when the Supreme 
Indifference has absorbed all of Pain sorrow 
will be no more, and when sorrow is gone 
the universe will disappear. 

The worst ill that can befall me is more 
easily realized by the imagination and is 
known by the intellect to be more probable 
than the greatest good fortune. The worst 
is always probable; the best is often not 
even possible. So in mentioning some great 
potential misfortune we always preface it 



182 THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 

with the fear-begotten prayer, "which God 
forbid." But the smile of incredulity is 
never very far from our dreams of felicity. 
The Eternal has packed its mighty secrets 
in our pains, and if our cosmic memories 
were as profound as our cosmic experiences 
we would never hope. Our roots are be- 
neath us, but the flower — the mind — is born 
anew in each life and dies with that life. 
The elder dreams revisit us at certain un- 
expected moments in our lives, and it is 
then, in a single moment, we nail truth, and 
see the unimaginable woe in things, the uni- 
versality of anguish, the giant, writhing 
spectres of the things we have been. Pluck 
from that moment its gift of wisdom, or 
forever live the dupe of the Impossible! 

For what is this lapse between two eter- 
nities we call life? Life is a myth and a 
mirage. The past never existed. We have 
clothed a few mean facts in a tawdry rem- 
iniscent fancy. Our memories of childhood 
are not the same as the childhood we re- 
member. Our youth is a sunken, lost At- 
lantis; but when we lived that youth it was 
commonplace — oh, so commonplace! The 
future is a mirage woven of dreams. What- 
might-have-been is the mother of fantasy. 



THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 183 

Or, life is a series of endlessly recurring 
dreams. That dream which recurs oftenest 
we style mathematical truth ; the dream that 
comes but once in a thousand years we call 
a miracle. 

What have we of light? The more light 
there is in the world the blacker grows the 
encircling gloom. Increase of light does 
not mean decrease of darkness. You cannot 
clip anything from the Infinite. If knowl- 
edge is infinite the recesses from which it 
is quarried are infinite. The stalactylic 
thought-formations grow more and more 
brilliant as we move farther and farther 
into the caves of consciousness; but it is be- 
cause the darkness is profounder, not be- 
cause the crystals are brighter. 

And the lip-wisdom of science! The "uni- 
formity of Nature" is merely the uniformity 
of a belief. A thing observed by all peo- 
ples, at all times, under all circumstances 
is still rooted in credence, and not in cer- 
tainty, and possesses no greater claim to be 
the truth than one thing observed by one 
man, at a single moment, under a single set 
of circumstances. Truth — if Truth there 
be — does not lie in multiplicity, but in 
vividness of insight. That the sun will rise 



184 THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 

and set tomorrow is not so certain in my 
mind as that the process of its rising and 
setting is inane, inutile. What I know of a 
process is of less importance to me than 
what I see in that process. 

We know nothing of Law. We hear its 
reverberations as it thunders through the 
soul or catch its shadow on our retina as 
it weaves the dawn or evanesces in the mys- 
tery of death; but the thing itself cannot 
be laid hold of. Experience is hearsay, 
seeming. It is the same with thought. As 
in the physical world no two bodies can 
ever touch, so in the soul world no being 
ever touches his thought. Between him 
and his highest thought there is a chasm 
which even his imagination cannot bridge. 
It is girdled by a sacred fire that holds him 
at bay. Into its centre man can never 
penetrate. We but lie in its shadow. And 
man himself is but one of the infinite num- 
ber of shadows cast by the syncopated 
breathing of the Shadow-Maker, the myth- 
weaver, who reigns excarnate in Eternity, 
who is everlastingly and who everlastingly Is. 
Stability eludes the net of thought. We 
seek stability in change, and when it comes 
as Death we flee from it in terror. 



THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 185 

Time baffles like a dream. Time is but 
the slime left by the slugworm of Circum- 
stance as it crawls lazily over the white 
eternities. 

Our acts ridicule our thoughts. The last 
sin to die will be Pride because it is the 
first and greatest virtue. Everything that 
is born with an ego has pride; those who 
affirm life do it through pride; those who 
seek death do it through a greater pride; 
those who battle do it through pride; those 
who renounce in sackcloth and ashes are 
ill of great pride. All is pride and a 
vanity and a mockery. And the first virtue 
was the first sin. Distinctions are circum- 
stantial. Behind all masks of time and 
place there is the grimace of Mephisto. 

Say aloud but once, "I am happy!" — 
whisper it to the air, whisper it into the 
night, murmur it to thy pillow, and already 
the navvies have razed the edifice, the fiends 
are at their sculduggery. Happiness and 
consciousness are at war. The lids always 
lie closed over the eyes of Happiness; her 
lashes are fine needles; you cannot rape her 
sight with impunity. 

Ideas — Plato's verities — are at last as 
dust. Ideas grow senile and slumber and 



186 THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 

die and lie in their graves for long ages and 
come again in the garb of youth and 
slaughter and slay and liberate; and this 
death and resurrection go on throughout 
all time. In Time there is nothing new; 
and Eternity is neither new nor old. 

Who shall sleep and dream not? In what 
a place are the Ideas housed ! What a slum's 
lodging-house is the brain of man! What 
strange, ragged, unshorn thoughts take up 
their home there in the night, and slink 
away in the morn, maybe never to return; 
what loathsome-visaged impulses take up 
their bed and board there! And sometimes 
there come wan, pale wayfarers who seem 
to bear about them the griefs of ageless days 
and who flit away as they came — like ghosts 
in the dawnlight. 

Ideas reflect only the temporal order — 
that grim and grimy rent in Eternity. 

For we are the ligatures of a Relation. 
When dream and deed are one then self- 
consciousness will disappear. When emo- 
tion, intellect and act are knit into such a 
unity that the joints and seams have dis- 
appeared, then comes the Man- God — then 
will the Ideal be made real and the Real 
be the Ideal. 



THE TRAIL OF THE WORM 187 

Vain dream! It is the war of wills that 
breeds limitation, and so long as there 
is limitation there is Pain, and pain — the 
severance of dream from deed — brings us 
back to self -consciousness. 

The waters are lifted to the moon, but 
will never reach the moon — so our dreams 
tend to deeds, but they ever remain dreams. 



COSMIC MARIONETTES 

ik LL the great novelists are fatalists. 
/_% Admission or denial on their part 
•*• -^- is beside the question. The man 
who believes in free will is a fatalist. He 
is temperamentally what he is. Fate is 
mental squint; it is the angle of vision, a 
viewpoint, physical compulsion. 

Balzac called himself the "Secretary of 
Society," and his books are but an inven- 
tory of its forces. These forces he incar- 
nated and called human beings. He thought 
the human soul could be identified with 
electricity, and conferred on it about as 
much free will as he would have accorded 
any other kind of battery. From his Jovian 
heights he surveyed the movements of these 
galvanized figures; recorded their attrac- 
tions and repulsions; pulled them apart and 
showed us their insides ; and made you feel 
when he had finished his task that his brain 
was the House of Life, and we the wonder 
children of his creation. His men and 

(188) 



COSMIC MARIONETTES 189 

women drift hither and thither on the 
soundless sea of Being, while the viewless 
gods of the deep are the masters of the 
currents. 

Thackeray is always taking you aside 
and explaining the way he does the trick. 
He brings each of his characters into life 
with a drag on him — the drag of having 
to be himself. All of Thackeray's creations 
carry this air of compulsion with them. 
They are hand-me-down human beings, 
and wear the look of long ill-usage. In 
the nature of things Beatrix Esmond must 
become the Baroness Bernstein. She seems 
to expect some such destiny, and accepts 
it with delicious sang-froid. Foker is — just 
Foker ; he coudn't possibly be anybody else, 
and Dobbin we know has been Dobbin 
from all eternity. Thackeray's belief in 
an overruling Destiny was so profound 
that his gentle soul, half -frightened at his 
conclusions, was always casting around for 
ways and means to let the old Gorgon 
down easily. 

Turgenev's characters are gripped in a 
vise. They go through life like somnam- 
bulists. Bazaroff is an arsenal of tenden- 
cies. Liza is a mediaeval nun that by some 



190 COSMIC MARIONETTES 

curious freak has been revamped for nine- 
teenth-century consumption. Her soul, 
shocked by the secular and buffeted by the 
trivial, sought again the cloistral glooms 
of the nunnery. 

Hardy's and Meredith's characters are 
of a piece. The searing breath of life blows 
with equal force in their pages. Spiritual 
resistance is fate working from the other 
side. Chloe was blasted from within; Tess 
was blasted from without. 

Zola's fatalism is more pronounced than 
any of these masters of fiction. This is 
because of the stress he lays on heredity 
and environment. His mission was to 
assort our souls and pigeonhole them. He 
was, indeed, the Claude Bernard of imag- 
inative literature. Blood, nerve, cell — there 
you are. Pick out good forebears, for you 
are the wraith of a dead man. You are 
integrated matter in the process of redis- 
tribution. The history of your atoms is 
the history of your soul. You "elect" to 
lead a drab life; but your resolution counts 
for nothing; some day it shall melt like 
wax in the fires of sudden desire. The 
future is an ogre; it is the past that slays. 
Zola's miscroscopic eye, his piercing 



COSMIC MARIONETTES 191 

glances into the subsoil of life, are nowhere 
better exemplified than in his masterwork, 
"L'Assommoir." It is a fine study of the 
subtle laws that damn. The connection be- 
tween an injured foot and a drunkard's 
death — where is it? That's the art of it. 
Moral logic there is none; but there is an 
intellectual logic. The links in the chain of 
causation — the connection between Cou- 
peau's physical and mental fall — were 
forged by a cunning Fate. 

Our lives are steeped in these subtleties. 
Each moment is big with ante-natal pur- 
pose. Our characters are pieced together 
by trifles that escape observation, and the 
way of our degradation is fixed. 

Focus the mind for one moment on this 
world of the great novelists. What a piece- 
meal pageant! What a carnival of marion- 
ettes! What cosmic mummery! Tentative 
men and women; alleged lives; souls barely 
basted to a body ; suggestions ; thin pipings ; 
the unevolved elemental; stumps and ends 
and shreds and butts of beings. 

Here in this bogus earth-world, in this 
slimy Malebolge, everything is planned; 
nothing is completed. These children, 
tethered to the Iron Ring of Necessity, eat 



192 COSMIC MARIONETTES 

the cake of hope; the brown bread of the 
tangible is thrown into the street. We are 
starving today, but it will always rain 
manna tomorrow! 

Are these creations aught but somnam- 
bulists who walk in the brains of their crea- 
tors? — and are we of flesh and blood aught 
but somnabulists who walk in the dream- 
cells of a hidden god? These master-dream- 
ers, these wraith-workers — will they wake 
at the cock-crow of Eternity? Nay, they 
are bubble-blowers as we are bubble-blown; 
they are not voices, they are voiced; and 
Charles B ovary was as "real" as Napoleon 
Bonaparte. 

These men who sketch life are used. They 
submit their souls to the spirit, and their 
characters move in the grooves of inexor- 
able law. No man knows what he does; 
no great novelist ever knew what he was 
writing. His fingers clutch the pen, but 
the writing is mere copying; the original 
is in the nature of things. His brain is 
nothing more than a phonograph; he is a 
notary of the spirit, a transcriber of the 
Law, a scrivener of the gods, an assorter 
of junk. 

Destiny works through the intellect, and 



COSMIC MARIONETTES 193 

the seers of life are subalterns. They sail 
under sealed orders. Thev live with the 
Great Camerado, but not on equal terms. 
He is hidden — behind a pebble, it may be. 
You may kick it, but He smiles — for He is 
the kick. 

The author of "Madame Bovary" was 
Madame Bovary. Flaubert was her secre- 
tary. 



THE DRAMA OF DAYS 

A DAY! From the first opalescent 
slur on the horizon to the last fire- 
flecked cloud that hangs on the 
last sunray, shot up from the abysm into 
which the sun has fallen, on through the 
span of ebon we call the night till the 
moment when that opalescent slur again 
slinks over the horizon — what things are 
spun for us in that time! 

Time is a coxcomb, and the days are his 
many vestments. Days are, again, the 
calendar of Chance, the dial of our sorrows 
and revolts and joys. 

In youth each day is a golden scabbard 
from which we drag a glittering sword to 
conquer some imaginative domain. In age 
each day is but another fold in a winding- 
sheet that muffles a gray, out-running uni- 
verse. 

In that subtle ebb of the spirit which 
we call memory there stand out gauntly, like 
shoals that rise from the ocean after its 
flood, days that were memorable in their 

(194) 



THE DRAMA OF DAYS 195 

events, days with the shine and shimmer of 
some triumph on their brows or with the 
bitter record of some reprisal of Chance 
branded on their cheeks. Then it is that 
imagination, in that look backwards, per- 
sonifies the days, giving to arbitrary divis- 
ions of time this or that quality, breathing 
bitter breaths into their thence corporate 
selves, conferring on that little congerie of 
minutes and seconds the qualities of malig- 
nity or buoyancy, placing in their hands a 
wand or a knout — giving thus to pleasure 
and pain a place on the calendar. 

The spume of imagination covers the past, 
and we carve in that passion of retrospec- 
tive self-conservation these little salient 
time-pegs whereon to hang the rags and 
tatters of memory. Wonder-children that 
we are, the eternal revenants of the indis- 
soluble Spectre, it is thus we breathe the 
breath of life into our old selves and mul- 
tiply our ghosts and replenish our empty 
mental wardrobes. 

On such a day — now that the years have 
pelted us we see it — Destiny came to us 
spying from its lurk-hole in a trifle. We 
have come to know that little things decide ; 
big things are only decisive. 



196 THE DRAMA OF DAYS 

Each second has a sliding panel over its 
surface; behind it, in its lair, sprawls the 
Sphinx, scrawling in the slime of circum- 
stance our future days. 

That day we laughed and we were 
doomed on that very day; this day we 
groaned and we were elected to joy. We 
know not what we do — we only know what 
we have done. 

Time is a moth that settles and nibbles 
where the dust has gathered. There are 
monstrous gaps in our days. We are lucky 
if ten days in each year are saved to our 
memory. That grave-like taciturnity be- 
tween remembered days! To memory and 
identity it is just as though one had not 
been. And sometimes from the depths of 
the Unconscious, from that unfathomable 
sea whereto we are finally ushered, 
there will start up, like the re-evocation of 
lost islands, a day long forgotten, with still 
its shroud about it and the unerased tints 
and hues of death still on its body. The 
time-sea tosses up many a strange pebble 
on these naked coasts of abandoned days. 

It is hard to segregate a day in memory. 
The emotions and dreams — knowing 
nothing of the mechanical inventions that 



THE DRAMA OF DAYS 197 

man has fabricated to keep himself posted 
on the progress he is making toward the 
tomb — are fluid, blend and link themselves 
by finer bonds than calendared tallies. 

All our past-remembered life makes a 
series of lakes in the mind, or, rather, pools 
wherein, with head reverted, we see only 
mirrored epochs in our wayfaring. The day 
we lay on the grass, and looking up at the 
heavens, suddenly guessed, by a quick 
amalgamation in consciousness, the illusive- 
ness of all creation, the impossibility of ever 
finding the relation of the finite Me to the 
infinite It — this does not seem to have 
happened on a day — really, it was only a 
minute in that day — but, related to our 
future spiritual existence, it happened in 
a cycle set ap t * f for us by our destiny. The 
rough clutch ox Tiory dragging that im- 
memorial minut, iigher and higher above 
the seas of mnemonic oblivion as the years 
go by has inflated and transfigured that 
minute in that May or June day to gigan- 
tesque proportions. 

For the ego marks off its history on sun- 
dials and moon-dials that begin at the Greek 
Kalends. 

And yet we hold to dates and days. They 



198 THE DRAMA OF DAYS 

are the timepieces of intelligence, and we 
use them till the dust of death clogs the 
works. It is the ineradicable instinct for 
the tangible that sends us back over our 
tracks seeking the specific day for this or 
that adventure or revelation. Our feet are 
moored to the concrete however much our 
heads bob in the timeless ether. 



ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL 
LAW 

ALL life is absorption — a sucking up, 
a blending of forces. Absorption 
^ and dissipation are the laws that 
govern all the processes of the organic and 
the inorganic worlds. I say absorption and 
dissipation, but, properly there is nothing 
but absorption. Dissipation is but absorp- 
tion seen from the other side. 

The sun dissipates heat and light, but 
the earth consumes both. Moving bodies 
pulse their vibrations into the atmosphere, 
and the atmosphere is lost in ether. The 
seed drops to the earth and is lost in the 
soil; the oak comes forth and in time passes 
into decay, and is soil again, and seed again, 
and oak again. In the gaseous flames of 
the nebular orb a universe of force is ab- 
sorbed, and from the flaming retort of fire 
it is belched forth into infinite space 
in forms new and strange, to be absorbed 
again by withered worlds and passion-spent 
spheres. 

(199) 



200 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 

A mighty and consuming thirst pervades 
things. Naked forces skirt the topmost 
heavens and the nether depths of the seas, 
seeking to be clothed, hooded, wrapped, 
shod, absorbed in matter. Who are the 
dead but those who have absorbed life, who 
in coffined silence await new unions in 
mystic spheres? Who are the quick but 
those who have come to this plane to absorb 
planetary life and its myriad pulsing 
streams of sentiency? Indeed, are the live 
aught but the peelings and tailings of an- 
cestral existences — pale, wan relics of the 
dead, vibrant wraiths, trailing after them 
the forces and tendencies of their ancient 
lives? 

The living breathe and move and have 
their being because they have absorbed 
their dead past selves, because they have 
passed through unimaginable modes of life 
and sucked into their souls the breath of 
the past. They stand before us mere 
echoes, sounding-boards on which a note or 
two of the Great Diapason is registered. 
As a sponge sucks up water, so do we suck 
up life. Our eyes suck in the colors and 
forms of the material world; our ears suck 
in sounds, our palates suck in tastes, our 



ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 201 

nostrils suck in odors. These sense-ducts 
flow to the brain, carrying their flotsam and 
jetsam of impressions, and in that won- 
drous and ever-mysterious alembic the raw 
materials which the senses furnish are ab- 
sorbed, minced, blended, and from the magic 
cells flow those complex ideas that give us 
"The Eve of Saint Agnes," or "Mona 
Lisa." 

What is that vast dream that underlies 
the somnambulism of the ages? What is 
that Idea which coheres through incoherency 
and stands forever calm through cosmic 
clash? What is it for which the seer has 
pined, the saint has prayed, and the de- 
votee has wrought? Absorption — reabsorp- 
tion in the One. Names differ; tendencies 
do not change. And whether we be Bud- 
dhists and accept the idea of the non-per- 
sonal Divine Intelligence that is the sub- 
stratum of the phenomenal world, where 
phantoms squeak and gibber and call it 
life ; or we believe in the One of Pythagoras 
and Plato, or we accept the Christian meta- 
phor of the Father; or we yearn for the 
Pure Being, or Non-Being, of Hegelianism, 
or crave for immersion in the Oversoul of 
Transcendentalism — whether it be any one 



202 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 

of these, it is reabsorption we are conscious- 
ly or unconsciously seeking. It is this in- 
tuition that is the basic concept of all reli- 
gions and religio-philosophic systems. 

"Absorption in God" is the primary in- 
stinct of the religious soul and the last hope 
of man. The temporal order is built of ex- 
pediency; its construction has been piece- 
meal; its forms are transitory. It is a mere 
stop -gap between Eternity and Eternity. 
It is a buffer state. Built in time, grounded 
in the shifting sands of Change and Cir- 
cumstance, it is destined to die with the 
planet. 

It is the widest generalizations we crave. 
Science does not crawl from point to point ; 
it circles from generalization to generaliza- 
tion. Each ending is but a beginning, and 
each outermost an interior. The horizon 
broadens with our ascension. Line merges 
into line, circle into circle, cycle into cycle, 
and still the press is ever forward. We 
believe we are absorbing, while in reality 
we are being absorbed. We believe we 
are discovering, while in truth we are being 
discovered. With each new obstacle sur- 
mounted, the under, hidden private Self 
circles into broader life. We pierce the 



ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 203 

chrysalis of our last limitation and believe 
that in sloughing it off we are discarding 
it. But the Great Thaumaturgist never 
discards anything. The new is the old re- 
vamped. The skin we slough off drops 
silently into the Unconscious, where it is 
remoulded nearer to the heart's more 
urgent desire. It emerges transfigured as 
our present self. The mind, like the heart, 
has its systole and diastole. We escape into 
higher forms of life by daily dying unto 
ourselves. 

In society — that vast and complex net- 
work of organized, objectified Will^— this 
all-powerful law of absorption is seen at 
work pursuing as relentlessly and as in- 
exorably its obscure end as in the purely 
physical or psychic world. The individual 
is cancelled in the family, the family ab- 
sorbed in the tribe, the tribe obliterated in 
the nation. 

The social unit cannot escape the fate 
that awaits it. As surely as the needle 
turns toward the pole does part overlap 
part and the segmental become indistin- 
guishable in the whole. This law that passes 
up through the circles of social change is 
today apparent in the commercial world. 



204 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 

We hear much in denunciation of the trusts, 
those giant combinations of capital that 
absorb the small dealer and dangerous com- 
petitor, not by main force, but by a pro- 
cess as legitimate and as inexorable as the 
drop of rain is absorbed into the sea or the 
dew in the atmosphere. The trust is our 
widest commercial generalization — the in- 
stinct of the sublime manifesting itself in 
the world of give-and-take. As the great 
nations of the earth assimilate the smaller 
ones, and they, in turn, assimilate the tribes 
within their borders, so the great purveyors 
of the necessaries of life are drawing into 
their hands the means of production and 
the machinery of distribution of the whole 
commercial world. 

The logical question now that forces it- 
self on the mind is: Why not let the nation 
instead of the individual do this? Why not 
make the nation a trust and the people the 
trustees? Why not absorb these giant cor- 
porations into the fabric of the State, and 
put the stamp of approval on a law that 
will have its way, willy-nilly? This is the 
dream and the jargon of socialism. It is 
founded on the incontrovertible proposition 
that all things tend toward a common 



ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 205 

centre, no matter how great may appear 
to be their surface diversity and differen- 
tiation from a common standard. It is this 
that makes socialism right. It is founded 
on the law of absorption, my euphemism 
for murder. 

No one thing can long remain wholly in- 
dependent. A human being may rise to 
indefinite heights on the rungs of his en- 
vironment; but in these altitudes the air is 
difficult to breathe. Gravitation tugs. Man 
channels his own descents. A remorseless 
Nemesis pursues those who rise above the 
common level. The ligature which binds 
man to man in works and days cannot be 
dissolved with impunity. There are mo- 
ments in life when the individual may, like 
Ibsen's Master Builder, achieve for a mo- 
ment absolute Selfhood, but his fate is 
written on the scroll' of natural law, and 
from his dizzy height he will be dashed to 
atoms. The ideal of absolute individualism 
aims, consciously or unconsciously, at 
achieving this quixotic independence. At the 
basis of individualism lies the competitive 
system. Man competes against man, and 
achieves power and place — or poverty and 
death. 



206 ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 

And thus are all things woven of one 
thread. Who shall trace the curvetings of 
Law? Circle on circle towers above our 
heads in rhythmic windings. Whorl upon 
whorl rises above us, and its mystic spirality 
is lost in the Unapparent. 

Our souls are engulfed for an aeon or 
two but to reappear on the curved surface 
of consciousness. Like vigorous swimmers 
who plunge beneath the watery avalanche 
only to rise sound and whole on the placid 
surface beyond the breakers, so do we sport 
in the eternal forces. As an eagle circles 
round and round over unknown seas, so 
we rise higher and higher on the crest of 
the laws that have ferried us hither and that 
shall ferry us beyond. Microcosm melts 
into macrocosm; the less flows molten into 
the greater ; the trivial dissolves in the signi- 
ficant, and through all the Will is pro- 
mulgated. 

In spouting mud and elemental mist — the 
Dream of Absorption was there; in pale- 
ozoic slime — the Dream was there; in the 
boundless underworld of instinct and blind 
procreation — the Dream was there. Belt 
and buckle and chain have burst and fallen 
into the past; belt and buckle and chain 



ABSORPTION: A UNIVERSAL LAW 207 

are forged — and the Dream persists. When 
the earth shall be hooded in flame and its 
poles capped and shod in vapor — the Dream 
will be there. 

Plunging from birth to rebirth, the soul 
of Man gnaws and files at his gyves. Limi- 
tation he recognizes as his one enemy. 
Through storm and bloom and the press 
of circumstance he seeks to clasp the Ultra- 
Generalization. Systems and codes he 
sloughs off like snake-skin. Time and space 
wilt in the breath of his Desire. He labors 
to force the Northwest Passage to the Polar 
Seas of Quiescence. He ponders on his 
latest, newest route to the Indies of Pas- 
sivity. 

Absorption is God's method — God, who 
is the last, the final Equilibration, the Spent 
Dynamic, the Eternal Static. 



ACATALEPSY 

THE doctrine of the Acataleptics was 
the doctrine of the incomprehensibil- 
ity of things. Pyrrho is the supreme 
acataleptic among the ancients. Anatole 
France is the supreme acataleptic among the 
moderns. All opinion is heretical. To say "I 
know" is to put the stamp of ignorance on 
one's self. If catalepsy is a possession, 
acatalepsy is the state of ultimate freedom. 
It is a condition of transcendental ignor- 
ance. The brain of the acataleptic is an Eye 
that through an eternity of time focuses its 
vision in an infinite number of directions. 
The world is a whimsy. Nothing can be 
proven, nothing can be disproven. 
"Eureka!" was uttered by a madman. 

Acatalepsy is the ecstasy of indifference. 
It is the Nirvana of knowledge. Pyrrho 
lived in a world without longitude or lati- 
tude. The "I think, therefore I am" of 
Descartes would have been written, "I 
think, therefore I only think I am" by 

(208) 



ACATALEPSY 209 



Pyrrho. At the touch of this Prospero of 
negations the dogmas of the world crumble 
to dust and the dear truths we have nuzzled 
on our bosoms turn to fantastic mockeries. 

Flux and reflux, eternal transition — 
what do we know? Belief of any kind is a 
species of hypnosis. Certainty is the super- 
stition of the senses. Time is an illusion. 
Eternity is a word. Each thing is only a 
mask for some other thing. Names are the 
placards we put on incomprehensible ob- 
jects. Nature winks at us slyly. There is 
a Rabelaisian hilarity on the face of the 
external universe, as if it would say, 
"Presto! Behold me! Behold me not! Hold 
tightly to your possessions, man; whatever 
is is not. That is my supreme jest." 

This monster of gullibility, man, believes 
in what he sees and touches — that it is just 
that thing, and nothing else! He arranges 
his beliefs just as he arranges his clothes 
in his wardrobe. His world is as definite 
as a map for a townsite. His God could be 
stowed away in a bandbox. 

The eternal Sancho Panza on his ass of 
Certitude! He munches his brown bread 
and cheese in the Garden of Hesperus. He 
picnjcs in the empyrean. He shambles over 



210 ACATALEPSY 



the stars. He is the vulgar Knower. He 
moves in an incomprehensible Mystery. 
But he never suspects. His universe is 
solid and substantial. His brain is a yard- 
stick. In the great hurricane of atoms he 
cautiously raises a parasol called a creed. 
"It is ten o'clock," "It is noon," he says. 
How does he know? It is forever the Hour 
of the Eternal. 

The sceptic is a bankrupt who through 
all eternitv cannot rehabilitate himself. In 
No-Man's-Land he is a Sultan. The nets 
woven by the system-makers will never 
strangle him in their folds. Through the 
walls of all the granite superstitions, 
whether they are scientific, political or reli- 
gious, he passes like a ghost. He is the mys- 
tic of realism. 

If Shakespeare created a world, Mon- 
taigne destroyed a sidereal system. Only 
the absurd is true. The senses lie, the brain 
lies, consciousness lies. How do we know 
they lie? Because another lie says so. 

The acataleptic glance melts the light 
of the stars and puts out the sun. Acata- 
lepsis! In the retorts of its brain it melts 
cosmologies and gods. It puts its finger 
on Death and says, "Not proven." It puts 



ACATALEPSY 211 



its ear to the heart of Life thundering in 
its Gargantuan hulk of matter and says, 
"Thou art only a seeming." 

Crescent and Cross, Scarabee and Dra- 
gon fuse and evaporate in the mighty men- 
struum of this alchemic ironist. One folly 
is pitted against another folly, one mon- 
strous illusion rises to confront another 
monstrous illusion. The iron gates of God 
are papier mache. Plato's Eternal Ideas 
are plaster paris. Brahma is painted fog. 
The celestial seraglios of Mohammedanism 
are sacrosanct pigsties. The Christian 
"Mansion in the Skies" is in cinders. The 
Kingdom of God is a fading mirage that 
even the dying are no longer able to con- 
jure up. The Jehovah of the Jews is a Big 
Wind. The First Cause of theology is a 
spite-wall. The Ego of the Romantics is a 
huge dummy swollen taut with flatulent 
German metaphysics. Anarchism, Socialism, 
Protestantism, Agnosticism, Manicheism, 
Buddhism are the tabulation, consolidation 
and fulmination of mental and tempera- 
mental disorders. They are the passing in- 
carnations of the Incomprehensible, the 
scoffing incantations of the immortal Maya ; 
the radiant revelations of the Immanent 
Yawn. 



212 ACATALEPSY 



In the omnipotent orgy of ideas the acata- 
leptic preserves an indulgent passivity. 
While the battle rages he polishes a spy- 
glass. He belongs to no army. He is not 
interested in the outcome. Only the spec- 
tacle enchants. His brain is ascetic; his eye 
is gluttonous. Over the earth go the 
armies— over the earth and into the earth. 
He is at Troy, at Waterloo, at Gettysburg, 
at Verdun — there is always a Bloody Angle 
in the combat of concepts where the fray 
is the most picturesque. It is all the horse- 
play of ants on a star. Aristotle and Plato, 
Spinoza and Hobbes, Leibnitz and Scho- 
penhauer, Pascal and Nietzsche — these are 
merely the gigantic oscillations of one pen- 
dulum. 

Doctrines flow from the agy ill of per- 
sonality. To be, to think, to know was the 
primordial heresy. 

This little man, this little man, who comes 
a-whining into the world to solve the riddle 
of Being ! This self -constituted aide-de-camp 
to the Infinite ! This sculpted piece of proto- 
plasm who with arms akimbo buzzes his 
prejudices into the ears of the Sphinx! 
This choreboy of a blind Will who believes 
he is moulding stars I 



ACATALEPSY 213 



Mahomet went to heaven on a white mule, 
another rode into Jerusalem on an ass, and 
still another who had Aladdinized the world 
rode to death on Rosinante. All symbols! 

Ah! If the sceptics dared laugh to their 
fill! The stars would founder in space at 
the uproar and atoms and potencies still 
unborn would age in their nothingness. 

The petrified smile on the face of the 
ironic Nihilist is a smile that is a weapon. 
All the bobbing hobby-horses on the merry- 
go-round of religion and philosophy come 
to a standstill and their riders sit motion- 
less when the Unbeliever is seen standing 
at the door. He is the grand dissociator 
of ideas, the surgeon of illusions, a snow 
that blankets all growing things. 

Your dreams ? — he skins them alive. Your 
God? — he splits it into an infinite number 
of particles and hands you back a hatful 
of waste. He is a magician. He can 
transform matter into force and force into 
matter, and both into the incomprehensible. 
He makes a witches' broth out of all the 
materials of human thought and brews from 
them — nothing, except it be his petrified 
smile or the glint of malice in his eye. 

The idol-makers fabricate through the 



-£- 



214 ACATALEPSY 



aeons. There are plaster-cast images and 
images in bronze and images built of ebon 
and adamant. But an end is made to all 
of them with the bare bodkin of incredulity. 

"What do I know?" asks Montaigne. 

"Just that," answers Pyrrho from his 
tomb. 



CODA 

THE Jews gave us Jehovah, a fan- 
tastic old man of thunders and 
scourges, as testy as King Lear and 
as childish. The Mohammedans gave us 
Allah, who punishes with fire and rewards 
with flesh; an ironic, hot-blooded, Fal- 
staffian God who acts as a "bouncer" in a 
celestial seraglio. Christianity gave us the 
symbol of Calvary with its pale God nailed 
between two thieves — which conveys this 
truth: Law and order come first; mendi- 
cant gods and thieves, take notice ! 

Olympus was an aristocracy. Sublime, 
cruel, satanic, merciful — these supermen 
and superwomen of the Greek imagination 
were based in life itself. They were the 
personifications of real aspirations and pas- 
sions. They were bubbles blown from pipes 
of clay by beings who loved the world, the 
flesh and the beautiful. And so no matter 
how far these bubbles went into the empy- 
rean they still pictured the earth, its forti- 

(215) 



216 CODA 

fying hells and its redemptive pains and the 
sex-aura — worn not as a shroud as in the 
Christ-myth, but as a garment of glory. 
Olympus was a place of quality, the Ver- 
sailles of the imagination; not a Vatican of 
diseases or a mausoleum of canonized 
corpses or apotheosized renunciants of ques- 
tionable manhood. 

Olympus was beautiful. There was there 
no stench of skulls, no reek from the unaired 
beds of Allah's houris, no insipid, simpering 
asexual angels whose whole eternity was 
spent in telling God the time. There were 
air and light on Olympus. A cosmology 
was here raised to the dignity of a sport. 
Whichever way you turned you faced the 
Beautiful. Whatever door you tapped 
opened on the Infinite. Every step on 
those heights was like a magical levitation. 

Mysterious, suggestive, equivocal, in pas- 
sing through the great Greek myth the 
imagination throws out its flaming colored 
shafts from its zenith to its nadir. Every- 
thing is fecund on those heights. Death 
is the one inconceivable thing. Homer and 
Aeschylus and Plato and Sophocles have 
been there before you. No matter. In that 
world every poet is a pioneer. The eyes 



CODA 217 

of those gods never say the same thing 
twice because their brains never focus twice 
in the same direction. 

Those giant mosaics of a spent race ! How 
many millions collaborated in the evolu- 
tion of those dreams? What mind put the 
first tint of that stupendous vision on the 
dead palette of Reality? Who was that 
Rembrandt with the drop of transfiguring 
color in his brain? Who was that Phidias 
who chiselled with his brittle dream the 
brow of Apollo? Who was that Michael 
Angelo who charted in imaginative ecstasy 
that ether-capped Olympus that was to 
eject from its mysterious ovum gods and 
goddesses as long-lived as the star which 
fostered them? 

Against that monstrous background of 
the Unknown that man in all ages gashes 
with the lightning of his thought Olympus 
stands out unalterable in time, a master- 
work of alto-relievo whose sculpted figures 
are posed for eternity. The tears of Christ, 
flowing for two thousand years from the 
unknown heavens whereto he ascended, 
have not washed away that breedy world 
of antique thought. 

Christ lives. Aphrodite reigns! 



218 CODA 

The Gods of Greece were not an 
ambulance corps. Olympus was not a dis- 
pensary. To be carried into the presence 
of Zeus on a stretcher was no aid to im- 
mortality. Paganism did not seek to amend 
nature or cleanse God. It personified the 
real. Facing life with every sense agape, 
it uttered a lyrical amen. Bounding from 
the heart of the ageless Mother, it uttered 
a hosannah to the Sun. 

Paganism was dynamic. It took the part 
of the eternally pulsating atom against the 
frosty glamour of Nirvana. It struck to- 
gether the cymbals of victory over the grave. 
It would have held Dyonisiac revels on 
Golgotha, and on him who was pinioned to 
the wooden Caucasus on that mount it 
would have bound eglantine and over the 
crown of thorns it would have strewn rose- 
leaves. It threw dice with Destiny, know- 
ing that Destiny is a blackleg. To lose or 
win — there is no difference. To have lived 
and to have played the game — that is the 
glory. Power and Beauty, Ecstasy and 
Frenzy, a riant diabolism, the sense of a 
weltering joy — that was the Pagan meta- 
physic. 

Man is a dike between Time and Eter- 



CODA 219 

nity, and he gleams with the waters of both. 
He is the corybantic apparition. His life 
is a delirium. He is a crackbrained God. 
His seventy years are an orgy of feeling 
and thought. This shatterpated upstart 
makes a superb gesture even before the 
gates of hell. The life of the dullest of 
beings is still epical. Genius is a dementia. 
The winged hounds of Desire have sunk 
their fangs into our souls and we have 
rabies. 

Thus do I see the soul of Greece, and the 
gods that pontificated on Olympus are the 
multi-incarnation of that soul. 

Front this lusty dream of man with the 
plush dreams of the theological dandies and 
the nanny-goats of morality of today. The 
lightnings that are locked in my veins, the 
passions pent and tombed in my nethers 
are sins! 

Power lies abed and sucks the nipple of 
a milkless breast. Beauty petitions at the 
gate of Mammon. The envenomed Christ- 
blood still flows from those immedicable 
wounds that know no healing. And we 
who once beheld Aphrodite shake the sea 
from her tresses and once were chum to 
satyr and faun and in another time dogged 



220 CODA 

the footsteps of Diana, we are rammed into 
a manger and cuffed into a charnelhouse 
and puddle in the sweat of fear. 

From that transstellar Olympus we are 
come to a carpenter's table. From the 
parley of the gods we are come to the 
bickerings of Gargantuan eunuchs. We 
who once wore the laurel wreath now wear 
the mildewed helmet of salvation. The 
beaker once filled with ambrosia is now a 
monstrance from which one may quaff an 
apocryphal Holy Ghost. Pegasus is be- 
come a Palm Sunday ass. Jason is a mis- 
sionary who decoys the heathen, and his 
golden fleece comes from the fleeced. The 
Bacchic amphora graven with mystical 
festive rites has become a consecrated bowl 
wherein Ignorance dips its dirty finger-tips. 

Christianity has amputated Life at the 
navel. It has watered the milk in the breast 
of Aphrodite. It has thrown the cowl of 
asceticism over Apollo. It has put a crown 
of thorns on Pan. 

But the snows on Olympus are melting, 
and in the veins of Time are the seeds of 
the old gods, who are incarnated again and 
again on the earth. Religions are passing 
epidemics, but Paganism is as immortal as 



CODA 221 

matter, as indestructible as sex, as eternally 
legitimate as sensation. 

Out of the purple seas of the Coming 
Time again rises the divine Aphrodite be- 
fore my prophetic eyes, and at Her breast 
she clasps Eros, who is the Christ reborn, 
regenerated, paganized. 

It is the Second Advent! 

THE END. 



TYPOGRAPHY AND PRINTING BY 
THE ULLMAN PRESS, INC., N, Y, 



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